Faith (8 page)

“Where did Aidan do his homework?” I asked.

“In Father's office,” Fran said.

His schoolwork finished, Aidan was allowed to play outside. His favorite spot, Fran told me, was the stone bench in the courtyard. Some days he sat there for an hour or more, drawing the birds who came to the feeder. She had never seen a child so rapt.

But in April, in Massachusetts, dry days are the exception. How did Aidan occupy himself on rainy afternoons?

Sometimes, to get him out of her hair, Fran let him watch television. Educational shows only, she insisted.

The only television set was in Art's bedroom.

S
CHOOL LET
out the third week in June. After that Art and Aidan were inseparable. With Kath at work, he took the boy on excursions to the Children's Museum and the Museum of Science. They picnicked at Houghton's Pond and Wompatuck State Park. Fireworks were watched; parades, a puppet show. Planning these excursions, I am sure, required time and research. Art had no experience in arranging amusements for children. To his own nephews—our brother Mike's boys—he was nearly a stranger. At family gatherings he greeted them awkwardly, asked the usual adult questions about teachers and Little League. The boys answered in monosyllables and tore off in the opposite direction, eager to escape.

Aidan's birthday was the last week in August. When Art asked what he'd like to do, the boy clamored to go to the beach.

They set out on a Thursday afternoon, Art, Aidan and Kath. Had Fran Conlon gone along, the day, the rest of Art's life, might have unfolded differently. He might be in his rectory still, squabbling with the parish council, growing fat on her cooking, and I would have no story to tell. But Fran declined Art's invitation. Two brushes with skin cancer had convinced her, finally, that her freckled skin was not made for the sun.

I have in my possession a packet of photos taken that day at Nantasket Beach, a place I recognize from my own childhood. Back in those days, Paragon Park was a mecca for children; its roller coaster and carousel drew families from all over Boston and the South Shore. The park has since closed, but a few landmarks remain. Rifling through Art's photos, I recognize the old carousel, now restored; Funland, the beachfront arcade. In one shot, Kath Conlon stands hunched over a pinball machine, frowning in concentration; in another she lies stretched out on a beach towel in a striped bikini, smoking a cigarette. Her body is a teenager's, small breasts, sharp hipbones. Tattooed on her forearm is the dark shape of a cross. There are several photos of a sand castle in progress, Aidan in yellow swim trunks, digging with a plastic shovel. A candid shot of my brother standing at the water's edge, his thin bare legs and sunken chest, his arms surprisingly muscled. It's the only time I've ever seen him without a shirt.

Of all the photos taken that day, only one disturbed me: a close shot of Aidan stretched out on a beach towel, wet and shivering. He lies on his back, gazing up at the camera—held, apparently, by some adult standing close above him. He looks confused, yet pleased by all the attention. He wears a shy smile.

T
he day Art was summoned to Lake Street, I was at home in Philadelphia, absorbed in my own concerns. To my surprise I'd been asked to chair the English department the following September, out from under a fierce old girl named Gail Hunter who refused to retire though everyone agreed it was time. I don't know what it means to chair a department at other public high schools, but at George Washington Carver it involves a small pay raise in return for countless hours of administrative work; weekly meetings with the principal; mediating disputes among a cantankerous staff which, in my case, would include the deposed Gail Hunter. I felt, in short, that I'd been asked to host a brain tumor. In addition, I was distracted—again and always—by a situation with a man.

The week before, after a long night of quarterly parent-teacher conferences, the younger faculty had set out for some serious drinking at the bar down the street. It's a place I've always disliked—its shiny brass gantry, its canned Irishness—but it's close to school and to a subway stop, handy since a few of us will inevitably overimbibe. That night, I am sorry to say, I was among the guilty, and Danny Yeager, the new guidance counselor I knew only slightly, offered me a ride home. He is a local boy and a physical type common here, blond and husky, with clear blue eyes and a broad intelligent face. I had watched him nurse a single beer all evening, his usual habit, and though this made me distrust him as a person it gave me confidence in his driving. One thing led to another, as people say, the result being that I avoided Danny Yeager in the school corridors and was both depressed and relieved that he hadn't called.

I was eager to discuss both matters with Art. I hadn't seen him in six months, since his impromptu visit to Philly; but we'd stayed in close touch by phone. He was never any help with my love troubles, but twenty-five years in the Boston Archdiocese had made him a master diplomat, expert at identifying hopeless situations and extricating himself without alienating anyone, skills that would have come in handy in the Philadelphia public schools. I called him several times that Friday, but neither he nor Fran answered the phone. Not for the first time, I was irked by my brother's refusal of modern technology: no cell phone, no e-mail, not even an answering machine. What if I'd been a dying parishioner awaiting the Last Rites? If his employer were any other than the Catholic Church, Art's quaint attitudes would not have been tolerated. But as I would soon learn, he wasn't the only priest in the Boston Archdiocese—far from it—who preferred living in the past.

I had a rough idea of his Easter schedule—I knew, for example, that on Saturday afternoon he might hear a hundred confessions—and so wasn't alarmed when he didn't call. But after Easter morning came and went, I actually considered phoning my mother, who spoke with Art daily. Not unusually, I couldn't face that prospect. Instead I called my brother Mike.

It's easy enough to sum up a stranger. The people closest to us are harder to define. As I have said, Mike is a person of consistent character. Since childhood he has changed hardly at all. As a boy he exuded energy; he excelled in all sports and hated school, its rules and constraints, the constant enjoinders to sit still. Though he often misbehaved, the nuns warmed to his ready smile, his cheerful way of owning up to his sins. By nature he is honorable and straightforward, or maybe it's just that he lies so ineptly that he decided early on it wasn't worth the trouble. In this way and others, he is a pragmatist. When faced with our father's anger, Mike took the expedient path. After puberty he was a head taller than Dad, and though both are natural athletes, twenty or thirty years of alcoholism will slow a man's reflexes. My father is one kind of fool, but he's always had an instinct for self-preservation. He figured correctly that much past the age of fourteen, Mike couldn't be safely provoked.

He had a young man's temper, and it got him into the usual troubles. He won and lost an athletic scholarship to Boston College High School: he got into fights, and his grades were poor. A year later he was caught breaking into an empty summer house in Grantham, but the arresting officer, Dick Brady, was a drinking buddy of our father's, and the charges were mysteriously dropped. After high school Mike worked as a security guard, a bouncer—the jobs a young man takes if he is unambitious and strong. At Dick Brady's urging he enrolled at the community college, got a certificate in law enforcement and was hired as a town cop. This was the Mike I knew when I left Grantham. Later—after the Navy, after meeting Abby—his life took a different turn. He has matured into a responsible husband and father, and made my parents proud.

That Easter Sunday I imagined the phone ringing in Mike's house in Quincy. It's a big place, handsome and solid, with four large bedrooms and a fenced yard framed with tall trees. Mike sold it to himself eight years before with his brand-new realtor's license—paying himself a huge commission, I have heard him joke. Since then it had doubled in value and filled with children: my nephews Ryan, who had just turned seven; and Michael and Jamie, the five-year-old twins. As the phone rang and rang, I recalled that Mike had invited our parents for Easter dinner, so I would have to speak with my mother after all.

Mike's wife answered the phone.

“Oh, Sheila. Hi.” That flat midwestern voice, with its shortened vowels:
Hiy, hiy.
Abby doesn't make small talk, not with me. She has her reasons, though they are old ones and don't seem worth hanging on to all these years. We are a small family and see each other little enough; I'd be willing to fake a little warmth if she would. Isn't that what family is all about?

“Honey, it's your sister,” she called, her voice muffled by a hand over the receiver, as if this were something I shouldn't hear.

As always Mike came to the phone out of breath, fresh from some feat of athletic fatherhood. When the boys were toddlers, he had enjoyed throwing them around the living room—
dwarf tossing
, he called it, a game that delighted all four of them. Now I imagined him in the backyard pitching Wiffle balls, the three boys taking turns swinging with an oversized plastic bat.

“Happy Easter,” I said. “Please don't make me talk to Ma.”

“You're safe. They didn't come.” He sounded tense, distracted, in a hurry to get off the phone.

“On Easter? You're kidding. Is Dad okay?”

“Fine. The same, anyway.”

“Have you heard from Art?”

“No.” Just that one curt syllable, no elaboration. Another unsettling note.

“I've been trying to reach him since Wednesday. No one picks up at the rectory. I'm starting to worry.”

“Hang on a second.” Fumbling on his end, his footsteps on the stairs. Mike was taking the phone down to the basement—to get away from Abby, I assumed.

“Hey. Sorry.” I heard the refrigerator open and close, the pop and hiss of a fresh beer can. This, too, was unusual: Mike drinking on a Sunday night. At one time it would have been automatic, but that was before marriage and fatherhood, a long time ago.

“Mom was supposed to call you,” he said.

“About what? Is Art okay?”

Silence on his end.

“Mike, what the hell is going on?”

“Fuck,” Mike said (softly—his wife frowns on cursing). “Okay, listen: Art's fucked. They're saying he—Jesus, I can't even say it. They say he molested a kid.”

It's hard to explain what went through my mind at that moment. The name:
Aidan.
And then a feeling like wind tearing through me, as through a bombed-out building; a great rush of air.

There wasn't much more to the conversation. The obvious questions from me—
What kid? Who says so?—
and Mike's edgy silence. “Look,” he said finally. “I don't know anything, and I don't want to know.” Only then did I understand that he actually believed it. Without hearing Art's side of the story, Mike believed this monstrous thing.

“He didn't do it,” I said.

I heard a door slam, a shrill cacophony of children's voices.
Daddy! Daddy!
My brother was needed, wanted elsewhere.

“Believe what you want,” he said. “I got nothing more to say on this. Listen, I have to go.”

T
HIS EXCHANGE
with Mike demands some clarification, a brief explanation as to how word travels in my family. I have said that Art and I were close, so how could he have withheld news of this magnitude? Why didn't my mother or Mike pick up the phone? A person like Danny Yeager—a trained counselor, a member of the
helping professions—
might go a step further, and wonder: was I hurt or angry, or at least surprised, to be kept in the dark?

These questions will plague certain readers—those raised, I suspect, in a different style of family. Evasion comes naturally in my tribe, this loose jumble of McGann, Devine and Breen. The reasons for this are not so mysterious. My father is a man of shameful habits. My mother is lace-curtain Irish. She will settle for correctness, or the appearance of it; but in her heart she wants only to be good. The space between them is crisscrossed with silent bridges, built of half-truths and suppressions. The chasm beneath is deep and wide.

Those same bridges exist across the generations: my mother and her parents, my father and his. On both sides, we are a family of open secrets. When I was a child they enclosed my innocence like a tourniquet. Without knowing quite
how
I knew it, I understood what might be said, and what must be kept quiet. If from the outside the rules appeared arbitrary, from the inside they were perfectly clear.

Art's news was unspeakable, by him or by anyone. I didn't take this personally. If I felt excluded, injured and aggrieved, that bolus of emotion was at least familiar. It attends all my dealings with my family, and theirs with me. Every one of us limps from old wounds. In a perverse way, they entertain us. We poke each other's tender places with a stick.

T
HAT EASTER
Sunday Mike woke before dawn, an old Navy habit. In the basement he warmed up on the treadmill, then stretched out on the bench. I have witnessed this spectacle more than once, Mike grunting and huffing beneath a bar loaded with plates, his fair skin turning a rainbow of colors, pink to red to nearly purple. It seems a punishing way to spend one's first conscious minutes, and yet afterward he is weirdly invigorated. He bangs around the kitchen whistling and ravenous, scrambling egg whites, blending protein shakes, oblivious to any poor houseguest feigning sleep on the sofa bed below. He wolfs down his massive breakfast, and without even a cup of coffee he is ready to attack the day.

On Easter morning he showered, made French toast for the boys, helped Abby dress them for early Mass. Mike himself stayed behind to hide the Easter eggs in the yard. This was a tradition from Abby's childhood, not ours; but Mike had embraced it. Each year he looked forward to standing on the back porch with Ma and Dad, watching the boys race around the yard like excited puppies, the colored eggs magically appearing from behind rocks and flower pots, the dark corners of Abby's gazebo. “It seems like a lot of bother,” Ma would say, though Mike understood that her disapproval was more general. The egg hunt, like all his wife's faults and failings, was a foreign custom, something Protestants did.

He was hiding the last egg when the telephone rang.

“Michael, I don't feel well. I'm not myself this morning,” Ma said, her voice indeed sounding sick and strange.

So for the first time since Ryan was born, Mike's boys celebrated Easter without their grandparents. Colored eggs were found and collected, a ham eaten, chocolate bunnies gored with small teeth marks and eventually gnawed down to nubs. Through it all my brother felt a creeping unease. Ma was then sixty-eight—not yet old, but neither could she be called young. His whole life she'd been immune to sickness, too mean even to catch a cold (“What germ would bother with
her
?” Clare Boyle used to say). Then, two years ago, she'd found a lump in her breast. Not cancer, thank God, but it had changed the way Mike looked at her. Suddenly she was no longer bulletproof, the indomitable Mary McGann.

In the afternoon he drove to our parents' house, to pick up the Easter baskets Ma had assembled for the boys. He enjoyed the ride, the roads empty of traffic. He didn't spend much time in Grantham anymore. Except for the occasional afternoon at the beach, Abby refused to visit. The house was small and cramped; the boys got restless there with nothing to do. “There are five of us and only two of them,” she was fond of saying. “If they want to see the boys, they can come to us.”

The neighborhood was bustling that day, families gathered for the holiday, Teare Street lined with cars. At the end of the block the Morrisons' windows blazed with light. Their front porch had become a staging area for strollers, grandchildren's bikes, an Igloo cooler, an extra case of beer. Mike drove slowly past the house, thinking he might recognize someone. Sure enough, Tim Morrison was getting out of his battered Ford truck, a magnetic sign on the driver's side door—
MORRISON ELECTRIC
Serving the South Shore.
Mike rolled to a stop and lowered his window.

“Hey, man. Happy Easter.” They shook hands and Mike glanced quickly over Tim's shoulder, trying not to be obvious about it. It's a look I have witnessed many times, a charged sort of alertness. I can imagine Mike shuffling past the Morrisons' fifty years hence, drawn to that house by some ancient instinct, like an old dog with a vague memory of pleasure.

“Looks like a full house,” he said. “Everybody make it this year?”

“All but one,” said Tim. “She's at her in-laws'.”

“Too bad. When you see her, tell her I said hi.”

“I will,” said Tim, though they both knew he wouldn't. “Hey, how's your ma?”