Office of Innocence by Thomas Keneally

passed on to all their students. Even innocents.
    “There
is
pure goodness of heart,” she told him directly. “Surely a priest would take that for granted. But there are also mixed motives, and we live with them all the time. Especially if they favor us.”
    “Do you realize,” he asked her in a voice he did not want Mrs. Flannery—should she be ensconced somewhere supervising their dialogue—to hear. “Do you realize this is a proximate occasion of sin?”
    She leaned her head to the side and spread her hands again. “It hasn't proven to be,” she said, like a challenge.
    Darragh could say only, “Well . . .”
    Mrs. Heggarty relented. “It has
not
proven to be. But I don't want you to think I came down in the last shower either.”
    Darragh still kept his voice low and fraternal, but something had shifted in him, something unpredicted. Noldin and all the parish priests of history had put their words unbidden in his mouth. “So this is what you'll do?” he murmured. “Sell your soul for items of groceries?”
    He wished the words unsaid. Indeed, she seemed disappointed. “Father,” she said, shaking her head, “you said you understood exactly what I meant. I'd sacrifice my soul for dignity, because people without dignity have no soul to save anyhow. For the dignity of my boy. So that he doesn't grow up as a bony, miserable little working-class brat.”
    Even in his self-disappointment, Darragh was still wary of eavesdroppers. “You're talking like a Marxist,” he murmured. “What about the dignity of suffering?”
    “Well,” she said in her level way, as if being gentle with him, “you'll have to forgive me, Father, but I don't see too much dignity of suffering here at the presbytery.”
    “How can you consider what you're telling me, though? And how can you talk this way when your husband has just been captured?”
    She still refused to be easily cowed—her assertions, which she'd obviously kept secret till today, ran confidently in the parlor. She had all the pride and skill of a confident heretic.
    “I talk this way because my husband has been captured. The fellow I speak of, the visitor, is a decent fellow, but he is a fellow after all. I was intending . . . well, let me say, not to give him any encouragement. I
am
a married woman. But I need to take the risk of those ‘occasions of sin' you speak of, for my sake and Anthony's.” She shrugged and composed her breathing. “I'm sorry,” she said, almost with a fondness. “None of this is your fault, Father Darragh.”
    Through an overstriving of which he could not cure himself, he was failing this hard, bright, pragmatic soul. Are the best damned? he wondered for a second.
    “Why do you come to me, then?” Darragh challenged her. “I don't want to offer you counsel when everything I say is rebuffed.”
    “But,” she said, “I feel I owe it to the Church to explain myself.” She lowered her voice further still. “And if I'd gone to some old monsignor, he wouldn't have let me do it. He would have roared at me and told me to be gone and say the rosary.”
    “Oh yes, but I'm soft enough to listen to all your ranting. You are married! That is the reality. And your husband is a hero.”
    “An ordinary man, but a hero. I hope they are kind, those Germans.”
    “And what will he say when he comes back, and all the gossip rises up around him?”
    “I must hope he'll be understanding. Of the fix his capture put me and Anthony in. Look, I
do
intend to remain innocent . . .”
    “And create scandal,” said Darragh.
    “Let the old scandalmongers have their field day. If they're so keen on virtue, let those old biddies live off lance bombardier's pay.”
    So, another argument dispensed with, he scrabbled for what was left in the arsenal of his moral theology. Later, he would realize that he should have been calm, rather than try to win the argument, but he could not see that at the moment.
    “One day you will be a grandmother,” he now