Faith (23 page)

B
y local standards, Art's wake was a tame affair. This is natural enough, given the circumstances of his death and the nature of his occupation; still, it seemed an inadequate sendoff. Ma had put out a bottle of Jameson's, and a case of beer chilled in the refrigerator. I saw later that neither had been touched. In the basement my father watched the Sox lose to the Yankees. It was agreed that Mike would sit with him, a security measure that was probably unnecessary. The arrangement was fine by me. Since landing in Grantham I had avoided Mike completely; honestly, I couldn't stand to look at him. (“Get away from me,” I hissed when he tried to talk to me outside the church.) It seemed correct that he spend Art's wake confined to the basement. And judging by his hangdog look, Mike seemed to agree.

Ma sat in a corner with Father Fleury, who spoke to her in a low voice. Devines came and went; Mike's old buddy Tim Morrison. Clare Boyle held court in the kitchen. I poured coffee and offered sandwiches. Mike's boys had been left at home with Abby. There were no children in sight.

The day passed in a blur of condolences. Only two conversations stick in my mind. I was standing on the porch, saying goodbye to Tim Morrison, when an unfamiliar car parked at the curb. I stopped in mid-sentence to stare. On Teare Street, a Mercedes sedan was as exotic as a unicycle.

A well-dressed couple stepped out. Donald Burke introduced himself first. His wife excused herself delicately, and I saw that he wanted to speak to me alone.

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “For all you did for my brother.” The words came out a bit awkwardly. In truth, I didn't know how to feel about this man. Had he encouraged Art to settle the lawsuit, to confess to the unspeakable? Did he really believe my brother was guilty?

Burke seemed to read my mind. “I'm not sure how much I helped him. I would have defended him at trial, if it had come to that.” He hesitated, as if there was more he wanted to say. But attorneys, like doctors, keep the secrets of the dead.

“So what happens now?”

“As far as the court is concerned, Father's death has no bearing on anything. The settlement will go forward as planned. He was very conscientious about putting his affairs in order.”

I stared at him. “You knew he was ill?”

“I had a hunch. Not from anything he told me, though.” Burke paused. “He was a private guy.”

I said goodbye and left him on the porch. Inside, his wife was standing before the Altar, studying our family photos. “You must be Sheila,” she said.

“Thank you for coming,” I said for the tenth or twentieth time; the phrase had become automatic. Marilyn looked surprised.

“I had to,” she said simply. “What they did to your brother was disgraceful. He was a wonderful priest.” She pressed my hand. “My daughter adored him. I don't know how she made it through the funeral. She's very upset.”

She told me, then, a story I'd never heard. Caitlin Burke was fifteen when, riding her bicycle to the Y, she was struck by an SUV, a distracted driver talking on a cell phone. She spent two weeks in the hospital with a broken pelvis, another month in rehab.

“I'd just gone back to work, and I hated to leave her there. But Father sat with her every afternoon.” Marilyn paused. “Cait was a picky eater—still is—so Father sneaked in egg rolls at lunchtime. He didn't miss a single day.”

“He never told me that,” I said.

“He wouldn't. He was very humble.” She said it in full voice, as though she wanted everyone to hear. “He had no idea how much good he did.”

T
HAT EVENING,
still in my funeral clothes, I met Clement Fleury at a bar he'd suggested. He was waiting when I arrived, a tall, somber man in his seventies, his blue eyes sharp, his wavy hair still more blond than gray. He'd abandoned his shiny black suit for a turtleneck and sport jacket—Italian, I think, and beautifully tailored, the fabric soft and fine. It suited him. In clericals he'd resembled an actor in costume, Richard Chamberlain in
The Thorn Birds
(a film Ma had forbidden us to watch, deeming it both blasphemous and salacious). Even in his old age, Father Fleury is, like Richard Chamberlain, a bit too handsome for a priest.

I spotted him first, and stood a moment watching him. He might have been an aging movie actor or a wealthy European tourist, hopelessly lost in the Boston suburbs. The illusion was shattered the moment he spoke.

“Sheila,” he said, rising. “It's good of you to meet me. I know this is a bit out of the way.” The gentle voice, the precise, pedantic diction: suddenly Clement Fleury exuded an ineffable priestliness, as though the Roman collar were tattooed on his skin.

“For you, too. Isn't your parish in—Wellesley?” Weston, Wayland, West Newton? One of Boston's posh western suburbs: W for Wealth.

“I like to avoid the local watering holes.” His voice—resonant, unabraded—seemed to belong to a much younger man.

“I guess it looks bad,” I said. “Meeting a woman.”

He shrugged. “Meeting a woman, meeting a man. God forbid, meeting a child. I'm a priest, my dear. In the current climate, any human interaction is suspect.”

I sat beside him and ordered a Guinness. He'd started without me, tipping back a short glass—gin or maybe vodka, I didn't ask. By my lights he had earned a drink, or several. It was Father Fleury who'd found my brother slumped at the kitchen table in his apartment at Dover Court. On that table were an overflowing ashtray and a glass smelling of whiskey, with which Art had washed down the pills.

“You knew he was sick,” I said.

He nodded. Art hadn't
felt
ill, not yet; but for several months the slightest exertion had left him breathless. His cough sent shivers up Fran Conlon's spine. Once, while sorting the laundry, she'd noticed blood in his handkerchief. It was Fran who'd pestered him to see his doctor:
Go in for a checkup, Father. Get your tires kicked.

“Why didn't he tell us?” I demanded.

“He felt the family had suffered enough.”

Art had seen his internist the day after Easter, a routine checkup he'd postponed several times. Over the next few weeks, more appointments followed. Tests were performed: X rays, CT scan, MRI, bronchoscopy. Later, as I studied his datebook, I would note a succession of doctors' names. Their specialties I gleaned from the Yellow Pages: pulmonology, oncology, radiology. The tumor was in the mediastinal region of his left lung, inoperable.

“The treatment would have been ghastly,” Father Fleury said.

I'd gathered this already, from
Small-Cell Carcinoma and You
. The drugs would be injected three days in a row, the cycle repeated every three weeks. I'd done the math: Art was facing a half year of chemotherapy. In addition, for the first month, his chest would be blasted with radiation: fifteen minutes, five days a week, to specific areas on both sides of the thorax. The oncologist would have explained this in some detail, as the nurse marked Art's skin with a felt-tip pen.

“I could have come back here to help him,” I said. “I could have taken a leave of absence from school.”

Father Fleury gave me a look of gentle rebuke, and I thought of the generations of schoolboys shamed into learning by that look.

“Arthur wouldn't have permitted that. It's the last thing he would have wanted—to be a burden to you.”

As the treatments went on, Art would have grown weaker. He'd have been unable to drive himself to the clinic. In his briefcase, along with the pamphlet, I'd found a business card:

Our clients generally live alone. No family
, I'd been told, by the woman who answered the phone there. You
'd be amazed how many people are alone in the world.

Was this how Art had seen himself? I thought again of the pamphlet: the middle-aged couple walking hand in hand down a road I couldn't imagine walking at all, never mind alone.

“My mother would have helped. And our brother Mike lives in Quincy.” Even as I said it, I felt foolish. This man had known my brother nearly forty years; I was still in diapers when he'd taught Art to decline verbs at St. John's. Clement Fleury had been Art's teacher, confessor, spiritual advisor and confidant. He probably knew more about my family than I did.

“Michael,” he said. “Yes. Arthur spoke of him a great deal.”

There was a long silence.

“So Art couldn't face the treatment,” I said.

“This particular cancer has a high rate of recurrence.” He stared into his drink. “Arthur might have endured months of treatment only to have it come back in a year.”

“So he was going to die anyway?”

“My dear, we're all going to die.”

We sat in silence, drinking. My mind hummed with questions I couldn't bring myself to speak. For Art's particular cancer, chemo and radiation are given together, and their side effects—what the pamphlet called “Ins and Outs”—are amplified. Nausea, difficulty swallowing, inflammation of the lungs. Diarrhea, kidney malfunctions, infections, crushing fatigue. Weight loss, hair loss, hearing loss. Other losses, too, beyond the scope of the pamphlet: loss of dignity, purpose, heart and hope. Though Art had perhaps already lost those things.

“You saw him before he died,” I said. “I saw it in his datebook. You had dinner the night before.”

“Yes,” he said softly. “We'd been trying for some time to get together. I was in Rome for Easter and ended up staying longer than I'd planned.” His voice trailed off. “I knew Arthur's situation, of course. We spoke often by phone. I should have come back immediately when the Cardinal suspended him. That was my mistake.”

“That night,” I said. “How was he?”

“You're asking if I saw it coming? No, I didn't. Though perhaps I should have.” He drained his glass. “He'd been despondent for some time, as I'm sure you know. But that night he was different, animated. Strange as it sounds, he seemed happy.” He closed his eyes as though trying to visualize it. “I suppose he'd already made his decision.”

I stared into my glass. This was what I wanted to hear: that Art's decision had been firm, immutable. That there was nothing I could have done to stop him. And yet, that final morning, he'd kept his appointment at the clinic, as though living still interested him. As though he might, still, change his mind.

My throat ached with unshed tears.

“It's a sin, isn't it? Suicide. Even in a case like this.”

To my surprise, the answer mattered a great deal.

The priest covered my hand with his. “It's true that despair is a very serious sin, the most serious of all. The Church defines it as losing all hope of salvation. But I don't believe Arthur felt that way. He was at peace with his God, and with his death. His faith was very strong.”

He signaled the bartender and pointed to his glass.

“As Catholics we believe it is wrong to hasten natural death under any circumstances. Of course Arthur knew that. Though in my view, that's between your brother and God.”

We watched the bartender fill his glass.

“After our dinner together, I felt uneasy. I tried to call him the next day, several times, but he didn't answer. That's why I went to his apartment. On some level, I suppose, I knew.”

He'd found Art's door locked, the rental office closed. When he called the after-hours emergency number, Mrunal Patel came and opened the door. Father Fleury gave my brother the Last Rites. He looked for and found Art's briefcase, which contained his wallet, cell phone and health insurance card. When the ambulance arrived, he followed it to the hospital, and from the emergency room called my mother and me. The next day, the briefcase and its contents were given to us at the hospital. A nurse had placed it in a clear plastic bag, along with the clothes Art was wearing when he died.

“You were very dear to Arthur,” said Father Fleury. “You and Michael both, but you especially. You believed in his innocence. It meant everything to him.”

The words burned into me.
I didn't
, I wanted to say.
I doubted him in the end.

He reached into his jacket and handed me a bright green envelope. “I found this in Arthur's apartment. I took it before the police came. I imagine that's a crime of some sort.”

“What is it?”

Again the rebuking look. Father Fleury did not suffer fools. “A letter, I assume.”

The envelope had been recycled—Art's own name crossed out, “Sheila” scrawled above it in black marker, in my brother's jagged hand. Unsealed: I wondered, for a moment, if Father Fleury had opened it.

His face was inscrutable. “It's addressed to you,” he said, as if reading my thoughts.

T
hat night I lay awake in my girlhood room, waiting for morning. At dawn I drove across town to Dunster. In my handbag, folded in half, was the green envelope.

I had trouble finding the address. I haven't lived on the South Shore in twenty years, and I'd never had any reason to spend time in Dunster. Fenno Street is only four blocks long, a narrow afterthought running between two busy avenues. The neighborhood was dead that Sunday morning, Kath and her neighbors sleeping off the weekend. I knocked several times at the front door, but no one answered. Relieved, I drove away.

That night I flew back to Philadelphia, where my presence was required at graduation. Weeks would pass before I returned to Fenno Street, on a rainy Friday afternoon—the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. The house looked abandoned and a little sinister. Shades—not Venetian blinds, but flimsy sheets of white vinyl—were pulled all the way to the sills. I would have driven away again, had I not spotted the lime-green Buick parked at the end of the block, as if wanting nothing to do with that house.

I crossed the street in the rain and climbed the porch steps; finding no bell, I knocked firmly at the door. Instantly I saw movement at a window, the vinyl shade quivering, as though someone were peeking from behind it.

The door opened a crack.

“Kathleen Conlon?”

She threw the door open, squaring her shoulders, a scrawny thing in jeans and a tank top. I was struck by her smallness—her arms were thin as a child's—and her swagger. Kath Conlon came out swinging.

“Look,” she said, “I fucken paid him. What does he want from me, blood?”

“No, it's nothing like that—”

“I have a lawyer. Tell Finn I'll sue him for harassment. Ever heard of tenants' rights? I have a kid, for Christ's sake. What's he going to do, put us out in the street?” Her speech was fast, a little garbled, her eyes shifting rapidly. I was no expert, but even I could see that she was high.

I have since learned a few things about crystal meth—according to Art and her mother, Kath's drug of choice. A few of its effects—wild energy, aggressiveness, paranoia—resemble those of cocaine, a drug nearly ubiquitous on college campuses in the 1980s, where my nodding acquaintance with it began and ended. But a meth high, I'm told, is trippier. Hallucinations are common, visual and auditory. Danny Yeager, the school guidance counselor—I didn't yet call him my boyfriend—had attended grad school in Iowa. He'd interned at a substance-abuse clinic at a time when meth labs were exploding, literally, across the Midwest: in rural Kansas and Nebraska, trailers and motel rooms bursting into flames.

Kath Conlon stared at me, her toe tapping manically. Her skin was very pale, her chin studded with acne. Her lower jaw slid back and forth as though something slippery were caught between her teeth. And yes, Danny Yeager: she was tense, agitated. Frankly, she seemed terrified, though I don't believe she was delusional. Flip Finn, I later learned, really
was
trying to evict her. She hadn't paid rent in several months.

“I don't want your money. I saw you that day at the cemetery. You knew my brother. Father Breen.”

It's impossible to describe what came over her face at that moment. Her jaws stilled; her eyes softened. For a moment I thought she was going to cry.

“He was your brother?” she said softly. “How did you find me?”

“I talked to your mother.” A stiff wind blew across the porch, sweeping rain against my back. “Hey, I'm getting soaked out here. Can I come in?”

Kath hesitated a moment. Then she took a step back and let me inside.

The dark living room was a shambles: clothing piled everywhere, toys and magazines littering the floor. The television had been unplugged and sat in a corner facing the wall, as though being punished for bad behavior. In the center of the room, crumbling plaster had been swept into a pile. I glanced around looking for its source and saw a jagged hole in the wall, the approximate size of a man's fist.

I followed her into the kitchen, where she moved some clutter from the table—beer cans, a pizza box—and offered me a seat. Kath lit a cigarette and stood with her back to the counter, also littered with trash. I remember empty soda bottles, wrappers from Oreos and frozen burritos, crumpled cigarette packs. A KFC bucket filled, inexplicably, with dirt, as though something were planted inside it. She stood before this display defensively, I thought, her skinny arms crossed over her chest.

“We have to be quiet,” she said in a low voice. “My boyfriend is sleeping.”

“Kevin?”

“You know him?” Her eyes darted anxiously. “Jesus, how much did that old bag tell you?”

It took me a moment to understand that the
old bag
was her frantic mother—kindly, heartbroken Fran.

“Art told me,” I said. “I'm Sheila, by the way. My brother talked about you.”

“He never told me he was sick.” She blinked rapidly. “The paper said he had cancer.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But he quit smoking! He
quit
!” For a moment she sounded like a child, stunned by the injustice, howling in outrage and disbelief.

“He smoked for thirty years,” I said softly. “My whole life, practically. I can't remember a time when he didn't smoke.”

I watched her closely.

“Actually,” I went on, “I was amazed when he quit. He did it for Aidan, you know. He didn't want to smoke around your son.”

Kath dragged fiercely on her cigarette, her eyes welling with tears.

“Where
is
Aidan?”

“My mother's.” She inhaled sharply. “Is it true that he offed himself ?”

I flinched.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jesus, no.” Her eyes rolled heavenward; all at once tears rolled down her face. For a moment she looked as young as one of my students, a teenager reprimanded by a teacher, crushed by a boyfriend. For some reason this enraged me.

“OxyContin,” I said pitilessly. She wanted details, I had details. “He took a whole fistful. When they found him he was already blue.”

“He kept them?”

I stared at her, mystified. “What are you talking about?”

“They were mine. He took them from me, and I guess he kept them. It was my fault,” she moaned. “What I said about him and Aidan.”

Time seemed to slow then, or maybe it was my imagination. I had to ask.

“Why did you do it? How could you say those things?”

Kath's eyes darted around the room. I had the distinct sense that she was seeing something I wasn't. “It was Kevin's idea. He saw those stories in the paper.”

I heard movement in the next room, the bedsprings creaking. “Kath?” a man's voice called.

Her face froze. “Oh, Jesus. That's him. You better go.” She butted her cigarette in the sink.

“Wait a minute—”

“He's sick, all right? He's in a shitty mood.”

Are you safe here?
I wanted to ask.
Are you in danger?
For a split second I reacted just as my brothers had. I wanted to take care of her.

“Please,” she whispered. “Just go.” Hastily she unlocked the back door.

I rose to go, peering briefly into the sink. One of its basins had become a cigarette graveyard, a damp, fetid mound of butts. I reached into my handbag for the green envelope.

“He asked me to give this to you.” I handed over the envelope. “He loved you.”

She took it from my hands, wiping her nose with her bare arm. She mumbled something unintelligible.

It might have been “I loved him, too.”