Faith (10 page)

In the end it was Art who baptized their kids. As they debated the issue back and forth, Mike discovered a startling truth, that he couldn't have it any other way. Looking over the precipice of fatherhood, he thought—didn't everyone?—of his own childhood. The midnight Masses and Christmas pageants, the school years at St. Joe's and BC High. The priests who'd busted his balls, who'd coached his sports teams. Kindly nuns who'd mothered him better than Ma had, mean ones who'd bullied and later amused him, the ones he and I still told stories about. All that was best and sweetest in our childhood: he wanted the same for his own kids. And Abby, to his everlasting gratitude, seemed to grasp this.

At least he thought she had.

T
HE NEXT
morning he found her hunched over the breakfast table, the
Globe
beneath her elbow. She stared up at him balefully, her face pale, her neck splotched with red. She slid the paper toward him.
SOUTH SHORE PRIEST OUSTED, ACCUSED OF ABUSE
. One long column on the front page of the Metro section, just below the fold.

“Oh, Jesus.” Mike read quickly over her shoulder. “They don't waste a minute.”

She stared at him, dumbstruck. “You
knew
about this?”

“Ma told me last night. I know, I should have told you.” Mike ran a hand over his head, still wet from the shower. It's a gesture I have seen many times, my brother who broke the window, who dented Dad's bumper, confessing to his crimes. “Sorry, Ab. I don't know what to say. I needed to think it through.”

A thump overhead, somewhere in the twins' room. “Mom!” Jamie called. “He's pushing!”

“No tattletales,” Mike called automatically.

They stared at each other unable to speak, bound by a pact they'd made years before and still lived by. They wouldn't let the kids hear them argue—not even now, not even over this.

“You've known him your whole life,” Abby said, her voice low. “And you had no idea? How is that possible?”

“So this is my fault?”

She turned her attention to the newspaper, as though finished with him. As though nothing he had to say could possibly interest her. “I should have known,” she muttered.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Mike, think about it. The life they lead.”

“Who? Priests?” He felt his face heat. “Art is guilty, automatically, just because he's a priest?”

Commotion on the stairs, loud laughter. One of the twins let out a delighted shriek.

Mike lowered his voice. “They're all perverts? Is that what you're saying?”

“I wouldn't know,” she said coolly.

“Well,
I
know. They're not.”

“Fine,” she said. “They're healthy, well-adjusted men of God. Except, wait.” She read: “
‘The Boston Archdiocese has secretly settled sexual molestation cases involving at least seventy priests.'
Seventy, Mike! And those are only the ones who got caught. How do you explain that?”

“I can't,” he said, his heart racing. “Look, I know it's bad. There's no excuse for it. Those perverts should rot in hell.” There was more he could have said.
I knew a kid. He was a friend of mine.
But why give her more ammunition? The goal was damage control.

“Ab, we're talking about my
brother.
And just because those other fucks are guilty—I
don't care
,” he said, interrupting her protests. “I don't care about my fucken language. Just because those other fucks are guilty, it doesn't mean that Art is.”

“Fine,” Abby said again. “You've known him your whole life. Could he have done this?”

Mike did not answer quickly.

“I don't know,” he finally said.

F
OR THE
next few days he felt paralyzed, imprisoned by his thoughts. Never in his life had he given so much consideration to Art—who, as brothers went, had always been a disappointment. We grew up in a neighborhood teeming with brothers: the three Pawlowskis, the four Mullinses, the mighty Morrisons, six brothers strong. As a boy Mike had longed to run with such a pack. Tim Morrison was his own age; like him, stocky, red-cheeked and blond.
All
the Morrisons looked more like Mike than his own brother did. Which itself seemed a kind of sign.

As I have said, Art and I favor our mother, and maybe it was this resemblance that made Mike see him as slightly feminine, or at least not quite masculine: neither boy nor girl, but something in between. As a child he hadn't found this troubling. It was only later, as Mike approached adolescence, that Art—that priests in general—began to seem suspect. His schoolmates joked about Father John Ferry, the young assistant pastor who directed the altar boys:
Don't bend over in the vestry. Father Fairy is wicked queah.
How the priest acquired this reputation, Mike had no idea; it may have been nothing more than the man's last name. Certainly he'd never thought about it in a literal way—that Father Ferry was an actual homosexual, that he ever did or would lay a hand on a boy. It was just something to say, a way of being
pissah
—an imperative that occupied him, and all his buddies, every hour of every day.

Still, the jokes raised a question. His whole life he'd had a certain feeling about Art, and for the first time he put words to it: was his brother gay? With the possible exception of Father Ferry, Mike had never met a homosexual. And because there was no way of knowing (short of asking Art, which was unimaginable), and because this was not a question he truly wished to have answered, he'd put the whole business out of his mind. Priests couldn't have sex anyway, he reasoned. Which made the whole question more or less irrelevant.

And there was this: for every Father Ferry, there was a Father Tony Kelso, the junior high basketball coach at St. Joe's. Though fiftyish and running to fat, Father Tony still carried himself like an athlete. His bulk, his gruffness, reminded the boys of their own fathers, the difference being that Father Tony actually liked them. He was quick with a joke, and didn't mind them talking smack; he could crack with the best of them. Father Tony was wicked pisser. You'd walk on your hands to make him laugh.

So priests could be manly, likable, admirable. Holy, even. His whole life Mike had believed it was so. He rejected Abby's smug conviction that any man who chose celibacy was an automatic nutcase. Sure, he couldn't imagine doing it himself. Certainly not when he was younger, when desire was like a medical condition, nearly disabling. (
No cure for it but marriage
, the joke went, and there was more than a grain of truth in that.) Mike couldn't imagine performing surgery, either; but that didn't mean nobody else could. Some men could master the urge, God bless them. And those who couldn't had no business being priests.

Like everyone, he'd been shocked by the headlines, the cases where the worst had happened. The worst being cases like Andy Stasko—their sophomore year at Grantham High, Mike's best friend. Stasko was a city kid, with divorced parents. His mother had moved to Grantham to escape the busing and the riots. To Mike, still burning at his expulsion from BC High, Stasko seemed cooler than the Grantham guys. He understood later that they'd had certain things in common, their anger and their shame.

For a year they'd been inseparable. They met each night at the seawall to drink or smoke weed, joined sometimes by little Lisa Morrison from down the street. Unlike Mike or Lisa, Stasko always had money. Where he got it, Mike found out only later, on the night he and Stasko ended up in the back of a squad car. Mike got off with a lecture and, at home, a few belts from his dad. Stasko—with a record, a weapon and no Dick Brady to look out for him—was sent off to juvie. Looking back, Mike saw that Dick Brady had saved his life. A few years ago, when two angry misfits shot up Columbine High School in Colorado, Mike had felt a shiver of recognition. It wasn't hard to imagine. Under the right circumstances—or the wrong ones—Andy Stasko might have hatched a similar plan, and taken Mike along for the ride.

For a long time, years, he forgot about Andy Stasko. Then, last fall, the name had appeared in the
Boston Herald
, one of the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against a pedophile priest. The abuse had happened when Andy was in elementary school, before his mother moved to Grantham. Reading this, Mike remembered Andy's anger, raw and palpable. His gut told him that the allegations were true.

These thoughts went round and round in his head like laundry in the washer. At home, at work, there was no point in trying: he simply couldn't put it out of his mind. “Go see your brother,” Ma urged. “Hear his side of the story.” She'd written, on the back of an envelope, Art's new address, the apartment the Archdiocese had rented him. Mike still had the envelope—the return address was KeySpan, from Ma's gas bill. He'd shoved it into the Escalade's glove box, knowing he would not need it. The thought sickened him: to sit face-to-face with Art, forced to look at his hands, his mouth. Forced to imagine what they might have done to a child. Mike knew he couldn't stomach it. There had to be another way to get at the truth.

And when the truth came out, then what? Mike knew this much: if a priest, anyone, touched Ryan or the twins, he'd kill the guy with his bare hands. Even a lousy father—his own father, a useless drunk—would do that much. But the Conlon boy, like Andy Stasko, had no father, a fact Mike couldn't forget. If Art had messed with the Conlon boy, who would stand up for the kid? Mike would protect his own family to the death. Should he do less for someone else's son?

A
rt spent Easter weekend alone. For several days he spoke to no one. He bought an inflatable mattress to sleep on, and spent an hour studying the manual to his new mobile phone. An actual bed, a regular telephone, would have seemed too permanent. At the post office he filled out a change-of-address form, checking the box marked
Temporary.
Again and again he told himself:
This too shall pass.

Easter Sunday came. In churches and rectories it was a day of bustling activity; he'd never before noticed how quiet the streets were. He drove forty miles south to Providence, to a church he'd picked out of the Yellow Pages. The Mass was crowded; he recognized no one. He knelt in a rear pew long after the service had ended, his head bowed in prayer.

That afternoon he drove aimlessly, northward through New Hampshire. In Ogunquit, Maine, he ate a cup of chowder at a restaurant by the sea.

Back at Dover Court the lot was nearly empty. Art parked and got out of his car. A moment later a black Audi pulled in beside him. He recognized Chuck Farrell at the wheel.

“Jesus, these speed bumps,” Chuck called. “Murder on the suspension.” He got out of his car and slammed the door.

“It does seem excessive,” said Art. “Why so many?”

Chuck shrugged. “Lot of kids around.” He nodded toward the playground, empty now. The day before it had been crowded with small visitors: weekend dads pushing them on swings, sitting back on benches to watch the older kids play. The men, as a group, had looked unpracticed at the whole business, unsure what to do with themselves, quite.

“Mine were here yesterday. Jesus, it was weird.” Chuck jangled his keys in his pocket. “My son is three. He keeps asking when I'm coming home. His sister doesn't even ask. I gotta wonder what she knows.” He pointed. “Her school is just over the hill, so this is pretty convenient. And their mother lives a mile away.”

“That's good,” said Art.

Chuck smiled ruefully. “Good and bad. You have kids?”

It's a question I am asked myself, with surprising frequency—by friendly strangers who consider this a natural way of making conversation, a subject of universal interest, like the weather.
No
, I have learned, is a conversation ender. Which may explain (does it?) why Art—lonelier than he'd ever been in his life—responded as he did.

“A boy,” he said. “Aidan. He's eight.”

Chuck nodded sympathetically. “You get him on weekends?”

“Not exactly. His mother—” Art broke off. “It's hard to explain. It's been difficult.”

“Man, I hear that.”

“We were never married.”
Why am I saying these things?
Art wondered, his heart racing.
What is happening to me?

Chuck shrugged. “Shouldn't make any difference, if you ask me. Your kid is your kid.” He glanced at his watch. “You feel like grabbing a beer? That place down the street pours a decent pint.”

Art hesitated. His empty apartment awaited him like a tomb.

“I have an early morning tomorrow,” he said. “Another time maybe?”

“Sure.” Chuck gave him a crooked grin. “Breen, you're a better man than I. Have a good night.”

L
ATER, ALONE
in his apartment, Art thought of Chuck Farrell's offer. More than once he considered getting into his car and finding the bar down the street.
I was thirsty
, he'd say simply.
I changed my mind.
But his own lie—outrageous, perplexing even to himself—stood in the way. Perhaps a retraction was possible? He tested out the words in his head.
It isn't true what I said before, about Aidan. He's not my son.
But it wasn't the sort of thing you could take back.

He flicked on the television. The local news had just started. As he did every year, the Cardinal had celebrated Easter Mass at Holy Cross Cathedral. This time the TV cameras had been allowed inside.

“The Church is not a political institution, not a sociological institution,” his Eminence declaimed from the altar. “It is a community of faith.”

Outside the protestors held signs.
HOLD ON TO YOUR CHILDREN
.

Art turned off the television. Absurdly, he felt a flash of sympathy for the Cardinal, who certainly hadn't expected such treatment when he left Missouri for Boston, a plum assignment for a dynamic young bishop. (In Church terms, anyone under sixty was young.) In Boston the old guard had viewed him with suspicion—his interest in ecumenism, his Harvard degree—but the new bishop seemed not to care. A year later he was named a Cardinal. He traveled to Cuba, and met with Castro. In Rome he was well connected, considered a contender—by those who believed such a thing was possible—to become the first American pope.

Art glanced at the clock. Six-thirty on Easter Sunday. People were at home with their families. Ma and Ted would be at Mike's house with their grandkids.

Fran Conlon, too, would be playing grandmother.

He dialed a Philadelphia number he knew by heart, relieved when Sheila—I—didn't answer the phone. He wasn't ready to explain his predicament, to say it aloud. Speaking of it would have made it real.

Again Art glanced at the clock. It was six hours later in Rome; Clem Fleury would be sleeping. He wasn't due back in Boston for several days.

Was there no one he could call just for the company? Just, simply, to pass the time?

Almost against his will, a name came to mind.

Rita Besson had been his parishioner at Our Mother of Sorrows, an apt coincidence. She was the most sorrowful mother he had ever known.

T
HEY'D MET
on what should have been a joyful occasion, the engagement of her only daughter. For Art, too, it was a disconsolate time. He'd been reassigned again, another wealthy suburban parish. With his fortieth birthday approaching, he was taking stock of his life. The loneliness of his days, his dwindling sense of purpose; his frustrations with the Archdiocesan bureaucracy: these, he learned, came with the cassock. They were simply part of being a priest.

Rita Besson's children were grown, her marriage long since dissolved. Her sole preoccupation, it seemed, was planning Celeste's wedding; and it was in this context that Father Breen became sucked into her orbit. She was a commanding woman, born into privilege, Miss Porter's and Wellesley. As the wife of a wealthy man, she had traveled the world. Now her husband had retired, sold his company and decamped to Florida, where he golfed and cavorted with a young live-in girlfriend. Rita had stayed in the marital home—she, and it, worth millions. What she did all day in the cavernous house was a mystery, though she was spotted often at fund-raisers for Catholic charities and on the society pages of the
Globe.

She'd planned for Celeste a lavish wedding, no expense spared.
He can afford it
, she'd once confided to Art, leading him to wonder about her motivations. Was the whole costly extravaganza intended as a financial punishment, a blow to the husband who'd left?

Rita's daughter seemed to harbor the same suspicion. Meeting with the young couple for Pre-Cana counseling, Art found Celeste lively and impetuous, and palpably angry. Her resentment didn't surprise him; he'd witnessed it often in children of divorce. That the Bessons weren't actually divorced, that Rita clung to their legal union, was one of many grievances Celeste bore against her.
A control freak
, Celeste called her.
I don't know how Dad lasted as long as he did.
Her fiancé, a small-town boy from Elkhart, Indiana, seemed bright and sincere. Art had said as much to Rita, earning him Celeste's undying gratitude. Rita, for whatever reason, put great stock in his opinion, and Art enjoyed the satisfaction of having brokered a temporary peace.

After the Pre-Cana sessions ended, he continued to counsel the bride's mother—on Sunday nights usually, often after some quarrel with Celeste. Mother and daughter argued ceaselessly—about dresses and menus, string quartets and wedding cakes. Art suspected that their rancor stemmed from a deeper source, that Celeste blamed Rita for driving her father away.

“That's ridiculous,” Rita snapped when he suggested this. The marriage had been shaky for years, and Alan's current girlfriend hadn't been his first. Wisely, Rita's sons had settled far away, in Vancouver and London; but Celeste, the baby, had stayed close by to torment her mother. This was Rita's assessment, and Art didn't entirely disagree. The young couple, usually reserved with each other, were in Rita's presence so affectionate that Art had to look away. The hand-holding and tender glances seemed to him a kind of performance. Celeste, clearly, wanted to show her mother how it was done.

He found this dynamic profoundly disturbing and tried, with probing questions, to address it in their counseling sessions: “Has your parents' marriage affected your own views of the married state?” he asked Celeste, who guffawed and rolled her eyes.

Meanwhile Art and Rita became friends. They made a New Year's resolution to walk for exercise; each weekday afternoon they met at Wompatuck State Park. At her dinner parties he served as a stand-in husband, sitting at the head of the table, with Rita herself at the foot. They joked about their similar tastes. Art's years of traveling, his unusual education, had shaped him in ways that made him lonely: with other priests he had few common interests, and with his working-class family, none at all. With Rita he attended the theater and symphony. They swapped magazines, CDs and books. He didn't notice—though he should have—that their friendship had fueled the parish gossips. Because Rita was ten years older, and because he felt no attraction to her, Art had imagined himself protected. Of course, he was wrong.

Clement Fleury brought the rumors to his attention.
Be careful, Arthur. Appearances count.
Clem's parish, at that time, was halfway across the Archdiocese; who had apprised him about the goings-on at Sorrows? Not for the first time, Art was astonished by the way news traveled. Boston itself was a bustling metropolis, but the Boston Archdiocese might have been Elkhart, Indiana, a gossipy small town.

He'd been aware on some level that Rita had grown attached to him, that she'd turned to him to satisfy unmet emotional needs. Now he saw that he'd done the same. For the first time in his life he'd forged an intellectual connection with a woman. He looked forward to evenings at her lovely house in Weston, which was far more welcoming than the stiff rectory. They had even discussed traveling together: Rome, a city Art knew intimately; Paris, where Rita had lived as a student. Driving home that night, Art had felt uneasy. Surely Rita knew, as he did, that this was pure fantasy, inspired by the excellent pinot she'd brought up from her cellar, the warm glow of her fireplace on a cold Boston night. Later he saw that she'd been serious. To Rita, child of privilege, nothing was impossible. Her favorite expression was “Why not?”

They buffered each other's solitude. How relieved he'd been, the night after Celeste's wedding, to take refuge in the air-conditioned comfort of Rita's house and watch a movie in the den. Over the years he'd come to dread the sacrament of matrimony. Watching from the altar as a young couple rushed down the aisle to start a new life together, he felt an overpowering loneliness. Now, for the first time, he had a partner in his melancholy.

“Rita,” he told her finally, “we need to talk.” Delicately he explained the situation. Her reaction surprised him with its vehemence.

“You can't leave me,” she said. “We're too good together.”

“We're not
together
,” he said gently. “Rita. I'm a priest.”

“I could make you happy.”

He was aware, suddenly and uncomfortably, of their physical closeness, nearly shoulder to shoulder on the fine leather sofa where they'd watched
La strada
and
I vitelloni
; in films, as in all else, their tastes were remarkably congruent. He understood that she was offering herself to him, all that she was and all that she had. He had never felt drawn to her physically, and in that moment he felt a shudder of revulsion. Rita seemed to sense this. She drew back from him slightly, wearing a half smile.

“Why not?” she said. And then: “Oh, I know. Your
vows.
”

He started to explain that diocesan priests weren't monks, that celibacy and obedience were solemn promises, not vows—a distinction laypeople seemed not to recognize. She stopped him midsentence.

“We could have a wonderful life,” she said, her hands spread as if to direct his attention to all that surrounded them: the handsome house, the walls lined with books he'd been meaning to read, Paris and Rome and countless more nights like this one, the deep sustaining comforts of food and wine and companionship and home.

It was a tantalizing prospect, and it came at a time, the early nineties, when his old classmates were leaving the priesthood in droves. His old friend Larry Person had left to marry—to Art, a shocking blow. Larry had knelt before him, asking his blessing, and Art had given it, his throat so swollen with emotion that he'd nearly choked on the words. Through the archdiocesan grapevine he'd heard a dozen similar stories. The stigma, if not precisely gone, was fading. These men, his friends, had abandoned neither faith nor church. They remained active in their parishes; some had families. They went on to lead, by all accounts, happy and purposeful and sanctified lives.

“Rita, I'm sorry,” he said, rising. “I should go.”

That night he wrote a letter to the Vicar General requesting reassignment. In the fall he was sent to Sacred Heart. He no longer had any reason to drive through Weston, but he imagined Rita Besson was still there, in the handsome house her husband had bought, eight of its nine bedrooms still empty. Rita, like Art, still utterly alone.