Faith (27 page)

H
e loved her.”

I meet Father Fleury for breakfast at a diner near the highway. He is dressed this time in black clericals, and the waitress serves him shyly. A Catholic girl, I can tell immediately. She will not meet his eyes.

“Yes,” he says.

He leans back courteously as the waitress sets the plate before him. One poached egg, a stewed tomato. My stack of pancakes looks massive by comparison. The waitress sets down syrup and a side of bacon and refills my cup.

“I blame myself, in a sense. I didn't realize until it was too late.” He tears open a pink packet and stirs saccharine into his cup. “He'd put himself in a dangerous situation. The girl had grown very attached to him.” He hesitates. “And, of course, there was the boy.”

A long silence.

“I know about Fergus. What he did to my brother. Art told me before he died.”

We stare out the window into the parking lot, where a young mother wrestles her toddler into a car seat.

“He was afraid to be around kids,” I said.

“He'd always been tentative with children.” Father Fleury stares into his cup. “I knew his reasons, of course. It seemed to me that he was unnecessarily cautious, but perhaps not. Perhaps he knew better than I did.”

Was he attracted to them?
I don't ask the question; I know that Father Fleury won't answer it. And maybe I'm not as brave as I pretend to be. Maybe, deep down, I don't want to know.

“The girl was troubled,” he says. “I think in some way that was part of her appeal. Arthur wanted to save her. Priests are particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing.”

“He was lonely.”

“We all are.” He smiles faintly, a handsome man still, and for a second I can see the young priest he once was, Richard Chamberlain at the height of his film star looks. Women—men too—would have been drawn to him. Had he ever stumbled as Art had? Had he too transgressed?

“Is that the problem? You're all
lonely
?”

I sound angry, and I am. The week of my brother's death, a new scandal exploded in the Boston Archdiocese: another boy molested, another priest accused. Holy Mother, like my own, has been a negligent parent. She has failed to protect those in her care. Like many people, I have wondered: is celibacy to blame? That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men—sound, healthy men—can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?

Father Fleury clears his throat. “Priestly celibacy is a recent invention, at least in Church terms.” His diction turns scholarly, pedantic, and I am treated to a history lesson I don't want. Of the Apostles, only Paul was unmarried. I listen politely through the fourth century, the councils of Elvira, Nicaea and Carthage. Finally I interrupt with what, in my mind, is the only question that matters.

“Can the Church continue this way?”

He gives me an indulgent smile.

“The Church can always continue,” he says.

T
wo years have passed since that heartrending spring. My grief at losing my brother is compounded by the knowledge of what Art himself had lost. In the last year of his life, he made a seismic discovery: his own capacity for intimate connection and love. Given a few more years, he might have had another chance, with a different woman, one who saw all that was dear in him and loved him in return.

Of course, that is my own fantasy. Art, had he lived, might have done nothing of the kind. But that I wish it for him, with such fervor, shines a light on my own longings. It raises sharp questions about my own life, constructed, as Art's was, to preserve my solitude. Except for the one brief, doomed experiment, I have, like Art, made my life alone.

Like my brother, I have feared the water. I dove in once but quickly retreated, fearing I would drown. As many fears do, this one dates to childhood. For as long as I can remember, I've watched Ma flail against the current, refusing to let go of my father, the dead weight she was towing to shore.

Those storms in Grantham, the chaos of our household: Ma screeching like a seagull, Ted McGann roaring like the wind. The wild destruction followed by hasty repairs, and finally, an eerie calm. When I grew up and finally had a say in the matter, I moved inland, a decision I have not much regretted. Until now.

I have mourned Art's death and his lonely life, and yet my own is no less lonely. His solitude, at least, was in the service of something larger, a spiritual path designed, centuries ago, to bring him closer to God. My own isolation has taken me nowhere. It has merely kept me dry.

Last fall, shocking all who know me, I bought a house with Danny Yeager. On Christmas Eve we welcomed our first foster child, a boy named David, who has himself weathered some storms. He is the same age as Aidan Conlon—the age Art was, more or less, when Ted McGann came into his life.

For all that my father destroyed, he performed that one great kindness: he saved my brother from Fergus. He may not remember it now, but Art never forgot it, and neither will I.

This summer I will bring Danny and David to Grantham for a visit, though the very idea makes Ma squirm. It troubles her that Danny and I aren't married. As ever, her rectitude remains a wall between us. I can't quite square it with the wild girl she once was, the
céilí
dancer, the hoyden of Dudley Street. I never knew that girl, but Art did. As he explained to me one hot summer night, drinking wine on my roof in Philly: only after remarrying did Ma become so fiercely virtuous. Like her cleaning and her counting, her strictness quells a terrible fear inside her. When Harry Breen left, the earth slid out from under her. God would spare her another catastrophe if she were very, very good. If she did everything right.

W
E ALL
continue. My parents have graduated into their seventies and manage as old people do, eased along by the gentle routines of age. Ma has scaled back her church activities—the bake sales and Catholic Daughters—and now works part-time cleaning a Catholic nursing home two towns over, less for the modest paycheck than for the regular respite from caring for my father. On those afternoons Clare Boyle comes to sit with Dad, who maintains his sunny demeanor even when the Sox are down. Grantham remains the windiest town in Massachusetts, but inside my parents' house the gusts have calmed. My father's equanimity is made possible by forgetting. His mind is like the Etch A Sketch toy I cherished as a child. With each new day his memory is wiped clean.

Mike lives, as before, in the comfortable house in Quincy. In recent months I have visited him there several times. Abby hasn't warmed to my presence so much as weathered it. She is pregnant again, with my fourth nephew; and her physical miseries occupy all her attention. Her animus toward me is overshadowed by her queasy stomach and aching back.

Mike seems delighted at the prospect of another son, a new addition to his band of brothers.
The team is shaping up
, he often says. Of the boys, only Jamie has failed to blossom as an athlete. To Abby's horror, he expressed a brief interest in becoming an altar server (the term
altar boy
has been retired, having acquired a dark connotation, and serving Mass is now a co-ed activity). He is my favorite nephew, a quick, birdlike boy curiously unlike his fraternal twin, the beefy Michael. Now and then, when I catch Jamie singing, my eyes meet Mike's, and nothing is or can be said.

Mike never saw Kath Conlon again. Those weeks—that spring's peculiar intrigue, its nervy dance—belong in his mind to another life. He has something of our father's gift for forgetting, though Dad's blankness is neurological and Mike's is a skill, honed by practice and sheer stubborn will. And yet this faculty occasionally fails him. From time to time, when he sneaks out for a pint at the Banshee, he will glimpse a blond-haired girl, pierced or tattooed, and for just a moment he'll remember the girls who once led him through life by a wire, a vivid and pulsating strand.

Kath reminded him of Lisa Morrison, and that resemblance drew him. When he thinks of her at all, this is how he explains it to himself. It's true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before. In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art's eyes, she resembled our mother. I can't look at Mike's face without seeing Dad's. Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen. We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds. We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

Kath's apartment on Fenno Street now stands empty, Flip Finn having succeeded, finally, in evicting her. He'd been appalled by the condition of the apartment, mystified by the slips of paper taped to the bathroom mirror.

Let go and let God
.

Meanwhile the house across the street, Twelve Fenno, sold at a handsome profit, at nearly 20 percent above the asking price. I know this because Mike sold it. For the fourth year running, he is South Shore Realty's Salesperson of the Year.

To Mike—to most people who have ever known her—Kath Conlon has disappeared completely. It is an addict's trick, this vanishing act, this dizzying plunge through a dim portal into a dark and beguiling parallel world. She lives now with Kevin Vick—I know this from Fran—in a rented apartment in Dorchester, her dream of home ownership temporarily suspended. Ron Shapiro's fee took an unexpected bite out of the settlement money; and of what remained, 80 percent will be held in trust until Aidan's eighteenth birthday. Kath's 20 percent is long gone.

Aidan, I'm told, spends most of his time at Fran's.

Back in Philadelphia, I monitor the newspapers. Every few months there is a new development, often reduced to a single paragraph: accusations and legal actions, charges pressed and much more rarely, charges dropped. In each case I wonder how much the paper doesn't tell. Is every story as complicated as Art's was, as replete with human anguish?

The journalist's craft is, to me, a mystery. My own story is written not for strangers, but for the flock Art loved and served. I want them to understand why he wouldn't defend himself. Though he hadn't touched Aidan Conlon, in his own eyes he was not blameless. He was simply guilty of a different crime.

I write for Kath Conlon, and for Aidan.

For my nephews Ryan, Jamie and Michael, who will soon forget that they ever had an uncle.

And though they may not forgive me for it, I write for my mother and Mike. If they don't wish to know certain truths about themselves and each other, they should at least know, too late, the son and brother we have lost.

(What Ma knew, and what she didn't. The question will haunt me the rest of my life.)

Ex umbra in solem.

I write to open the curtains, and let in the sun.

I
WRITE
to expiate my own failing.

My brother had been molested, and that was not his fault. And yet I took it as evidence of his guilt; in effect, I condemned him for it. I live with that shame.

The adult who preys on children is, to the rest of us, a frightening enigma. Of their inner lives we know little, and a little knowledge is more dangerous than none. While it is true that most pedophiles were themselves victims, it turns out that the correlation is weaker in the other direction. Not all victims grow up to be predators. My brother—I am now certain—did not.

I don't pretend to know what desires haunted him. Whose fantasies, after all, can bear the light of day? If my brother looked at Aidan Conlon, even once, with sexual longing, I will never know it, and for this I am grateful. I have learned all I can know, and all I wish to. As all of us will eventually do, Art took some secrets to his grave.

What matters, in the end, is this: if Art was plagued by dark compulsions, he didn't act on them. I know this, and Kath Conlon, lost in the shadows, knows it, too.

Was my brother tempted? I can imagine it. I can imagine Art a swimmer caught in the current, fighting his way to shore.

F
ATHER FLEURY
is right: the Church continues. That December, nearly five months after Art's death, the Cardinal slipped quietly out of town. A protest had been planned for that Sunday, outside Holy Cross Cathedral: when the Cardinal arrived to celebrate Mass, angry Catholics would demand his resignation. For many months, Voice of the Faithful had clamored for him to go.

Under cover of night he fled Boston, the capital of Catholic America. Like Arthur Breen, like all the other priests abruptly barred from their rectories, His Eminence traveled light. From The Residence where he'd lived for eighteen years, he took only a small suitcase of clothes.

The source of these details—my Deep Throat—is Father Gary Moriconi. He was no friend to my brother, and yet he is now eager to help me. His long loyalty to the powerful has dissipated overnight, as though he understands that his secrets will soon lose their value. He is like a trader in foreign currencies who hears rumors of a coup.

The secrets are many, and he takes pleasure in the telling. A coat closet in the Cardinal's office had a hidden back entrance. At His Eminence's request, his secretary often lurked there during meetings, taking notes.

“Imagine that—a priest hiding in a closet,” says Father Gary, with a gentle flutter of the eyelids.

In a stage whisper he tells me of His Eminence's famous antipathy for another prominent Cardinal. The two could scarcely conceal their dislike. Father Gary is an excellent mimic; he demonstrates the nervous way they shuffled their feet in each other's presence, two Princes of the Church pawing the ground like a couple of ornery bulls.

He describes in some detail the Cardinal's final days in Boston, holed up in The Residence like Hitler in his bunker. His Eminence slept poorly. Most nights a faint blue light showed through the windows of his office, the Cardinal at his computer monitoring the press coverage, surrounded, like a Third World dictator, by portraits of himself. Threats were a daily occurrence. The reception desk at the Chancery was enclosed in bulletproof glass. A panic button under the desk would sound an alarm in the Cardinal's office and Bishop Gilman's. The rest of the staff would have to take their chances. Father Gary pointed out, rather sourly, that there was no general alarm.

Vigor in Arduis.

That winter, the Street Priest, long defrocked, was stabbed to death in his prison cell at Walpole. An investigation followed, but no charges were ever filed. Nearly a dozen inmates took credit for the crime.

News of his death, I am sure, reached the Cardinal. He is now the Archpriest—the first American ever to hold the title—at Santa Maria Maggiore, that exquisite jewel box.

My brother said, often, that it was the most beautiful church in Rome.