Ryans had been a special family when they arrived in Lithgow, not just with their fancy names. Not just because of the little brother who had died. Or the mystique of their father, the one who had given them the surnames of saints for their first names. Those facts would have been enough to make them legends at St Patrick’s School. But there was another element adding to the family glamour.
The Ryans were descendants of Michael Davitt, father of the Irish Land League, protector of the poor, saviour of the starving 19th century Irish. Child of the Great Famine, evicted from his ancestral lands, maimed further by the dark satanic mills, Michael Davitt had yet turned his life and his country around - leading an unarmed revolution of the poor, the dispossessed, labourers and farmers, women and men. This was more than glamour. This was mythic Irishness, mystical Irishness.
Michael Davitt, Brother Joseph had told the class, was the inspirer of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King, of the Australian Labor movement. Davitt had included everyone in his vision of a new world of justice and peace. He had even included the English, which was possibly one of the main reasons he was not as honoured in his own country as he should be. But to the diaspora, he was a prophet and a saint.
Brother Joseph had been an enthusiast, a young liberation theologian, concerned with all the terrible suffering of this rotten world. The boys would have admired him more perhaps, if he had not sprayed so much spittle as he spoke. People fought to sit away from the front row in his class. Once Peter Hurley had boldly said they wanted the news, not the weather, and all the boys had laughed. Peter Hurley had been sent out of class. Brother Joseph was not, apparently, for the liberation of children.
It might seem hard to believe now, Vianney had smiled at Hilary, but he himself had been a very religious child. Sickly, sensitive, and deeply interested in questions of theology. He had had many fascinating discussions with Brother Joseph. He laughed as he told her this, but his blue eyes had darkened. Something had come in, or floated up from the depths. Memory or feeling intensifying their colour.
She held her breath until he came through, out of the enchanted forest, little boy blue. Most handsome prince.
‘When I was a boy I had constant colds and flus, bronchitis, breathing problems,’ he told her. It was those early days of confession and sharing, the vulnerability and the volubility of lovers. ‘I think it was my psychosomatic response to our move to Lithgow. To Dad going. To the coal in the air, to being on the dark side of the mountains. I was always coughing and blowing and gasping.’
Hilary had practically cooed in sympathy. His brothers, however, Vianney said, had found it all very annoying. It was hard for them sharing with a cougher and splutterer. On particularly bad nights his mother let him into her and Siena’s bedroom so that the other boys would stop complaining. So that clever Loyola, the eldest and favourite, could get sufficient rest for his schooling. Siena moved in to sleep with her mother, while Vianney lay gasping and ashamed in his sister’s small bed.
If he was still too weak to go to school the next day, his mother would bring him all the books of her childhood. The Six O'clock Saints, The Golden Legend, and little garishly coloured Lives of the Saints, where all the girl saints had ruby red lips.
‘You would have liked them Hils,’ he told her. ‘The stories of the saints are like your fairy tales. And they were all about us children. Ignatius Loyola, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Xavier, Catherine of Siena, and of course me, St John Vianney, patron saint of priests.’
His older brother Aquinas had drowned in the farm dam. Vianney had only been a toddler himself at the time. That was before the family had had to move to Lithgow. They said Aquinas had just wandered away, that he was lost in a split second. Must have unlocked the back gate himself. He was four years old. No one to blame. That was the collective mantra. No one to blame. His mother told them that Aquinas was now a special angel in heaven for the Ryan family. He had ‘been taken early by God’, as the people up at St Patrick’s Church said.
The phrase had haunted Vianney. As if God himself had taken Aquinas by the hand and led him there, taken the little boy to his watery death. ‘You know I have such vivid memories of lying in the bed,’ Vianney spoke softly, ‘puffed up by pillows, looking at the light move around the room, and feeling that God was somewhere out there, waiting in the wings, waiting to snatch little children away for some holy if obscure reason.’
‘Oh.’ Hilary had sucked her breath in, at the sorrow of it all. Little boy Vianney, his raven black hair and his cough, in bed in dark Lithgow with the red-lipped saints. Having to listen out for the divine killer of little children. While at his age she’d been out playing netball in the sunlight in Caringbah, in Sydney’s secular south. Not a ghost or a saint in sight.
'No, you don't understand' he said, not unkindly, but as if disappointed that he hadn't been able to make himself understood. She had practically sat up, waggled her ears and tail – to show her desire to understand – whatever it was he needed her to.
‘The thing was, Hils, it was all fantasy. Not just spiritual but cultural fantasy. Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s father, the empire we were reared for was already over. The Irish Catholic Church was gone.’ He said this laughing, brushing his hair behind his ears with his long fine fingers. ‘There was nowhere to go with my mother’s books of the saints. The time of the great faith and the great resistance was over.’
Vianney smiled. Whatever about the nonsense of the One True Faith, he had not lost his respect for that old culture of resistance. ‘But the village community around me, the Brothers up at the school, and Kate of course, the rosary addict, they all kept hoping the corpse would rise up.’ He laughed. ‘With my help!'
And who can blame them, Hilary had thought tenderly. It was so easy to see him as a luminous child visionary. You, the most beautiful man in the world.
***
‘No luck.’ Hilary reported back to Lolly/Claudia. Hilary had in fact rung Lolly but it was Claudia who picked up his phone. Lolly was out, she said, on one of his pro-bono nights with the St Francis refugee centre. What was it with these husband and wives who shared phones? ‘I’m afraid Xavier is still at large.’
Hilary did not like admitting this failure, her powerlessness over Vianney, to her sister–in-law, who was successful at everything; career, marriage to a hardworking, steadfast and obedient man, two beautiful daughters, and an almost paid off mortgage in Sydney’s famously overpriced Eastern Suburbs. Not that, to her credit, Claudia ever said anything about any of that.
Claudia also made no comment about the fact that she seemed to have married the only Ryan family member who could hold down a job. She made no boasts that she had wisely chosen prudent sobriety over Hilary’s choice, the choice of the foolish virgin, metaphorically speaking, of physical beauty and creative promise.
‘Can you look up Vianney’s iPhone contacts?’ Claudia asked, as if that was a normal question.
‘I thought you were a lawyer,’ Hilary laughed, ‘not a detective!’
‘Well can you?’ Claudia was relentless.
‘He has a password lock.’
‘And of course you don’t know it.’ Claudia made it sound as if Hilary was an unusual case. Perhaps she was.
‘Remember, Vianney is a Scorpio.’
Claudia chuckled. ‘Is that what you call it?’
Hilary
