Faith (2 page)

Around her the sidewalk was empty, the shops—a butcher, a shoe store—closed for the night. Above them, in apartments, people were living. The open windows rained down cooking smells, the scrape of cutlery. From above the butcher's came strains of music—Tommy Shields's program, she'd know it anywhere.

Mary Breen stood staring up at the windows, understanding, slowly, that she was alone. The swing of her life had stopped short and sent her flying. She was eighteen on the longest day of the year; she had bet everything on Harry Breen, and had nothing left to lose. She, my mother, crossed the street to the El station, where a train would take her to Dudley Street, and the dancing.

June 1, 2004

M
ost of you have heard, by now, what happened to my brother, or a version of it: the alarming events of that spring and summer, the single, vile accusation, still unproven, that made a ruin of his life. In Philadelphia, where I live, his story was buried deep in the Nation section, a terse paragraph picked off one of the wire services, giving little more than his name, Arthur Breen; his age, fifty-one; and the name of his parish, Sacred Heart. The Boston papers paid more attention, delving into his years at seminary, his time in Rome, the three suburban parishes where he served without incident. As is typical in these cases, his accuser was not named.

You may not remember the particulars. In that year, 2002, it would have been easy to conflate the story with others. The sad truth is that such tales are no longer rare. As a girl I once went along with my mother, who cleaned, for no pay, the parish rectory every Saturday morning. I watched her take wastebaskets from the bedrooms and bathrooms and empty the used dental floss and crumpled Kleenex into a metal trash can she then dragged to the back door. I was very small, five or six, and flabbergasted by the discovery that priests blew their noses. The very idea gave me a jolt.

That isn't to say I considered priests superhuman. Despite his flash costumes and his one, peculiar superpower—the miracle of transubstantiation, performed seven days a week, twice on Sundays—old Father Cronin had little in common with the masked heroes in comic books. And yet I did see him as
other than human
, made of different stuff than the rest of us. It sounds fanciful now, but I truly believed it, and I suppose other children did, too.

I mention this because a child's ideas about priests seem relevant to the story, though the world has changed in thirty years, and for all I know children have, too. Though I never saw a priest do anything truly outrageous, I probably wouldn't have objected if I had. Honestly, I expected them to be strange. The rules allowed it, even required it: the lonely rectories, the long black dresses. At the same time, I understood that these men were not born priests. My brother had been a normal boy, a child like any other. It was at St. John's Seminary that he became something else. That he himself was transubstantiated.

How exactly that happened is a question I still ponder. I was a teenager when Art was ordained. It is a memory that still haunts me: nine young men in white robes lying facedown on the cathedral floor, receiving the blessing of Cardinal Medeiros, who ran the Boston Archdiocese at the time. When he had finished with them, the candidates were seated on the altar. An army of priests filed past to offer blessings, a hundred times the laying on of hands. Truly, it was something to see. Yet I am a doubter, and I doubt that these rituals caused Art's transformation. At most, they simply marked it. Transubstantiation had begun years earlier. Art was not yet a man when he started becoming a priest.

He was fourteen, and I was too young to notice, when he left us for St. John's—its high school division, what was then called the minor seminary. It isn't called anything now. The Archdiocese no longer corrals together herds of parentless boys in the throes of hormonal upheaval. I'd like to say that Lake Street finally came to its senses, but the truth is that there are no longer any boys willing to be herded. It's hard to imagine now, but in the mid-sixties there was no shortage of volunteers. Every autumn, male teenagers from across the Archdiocese were packed off to Brighton, traveling home, as Art did, on holidays and occasional weekends. It sounds quaint, in an age when every teenager carries a cell phone, to say that he wrote weekly letters to my mother, but that is what he did. Ma read them aloud at family dinners, at church functions. Frankly, she bragged. To have a son at St. John's was a prestigious thing for a family like ours. I was an erratic student, and my younger brother Mike downright hopeless; but Art excelled in all subjects, not just the priestly ones. He had an ear for languages and music; his voice, before it changed, was fine and pure as the top register of a clarinet. As a boy he sang or whistled constantly, a habit that irked my father.

Cut it out, will you?
he'd complain when he caught Art humming under his breath.

Art, who feared him, hushed instantly, only to start up again a few minutes later. He was not a defiant child; in fact, the exact opposite. But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible—an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.

Whatever his other sins, my father, Ted McGann, is not a dour man. He has been known, late in the evening, to croon a few bars of “Mother Machree” in a manly tenor; in his young days he was considered to have quite a voice. It was Art's repertoire that rankled him. My brother was a small, slight boy; puberty came late to him, and the Rondelles and the Supremes were still an easy reach. I imagine the family sitting down to supper, an unseasonably heavy meal of beef stew or shepherd's pie. Imagine rather than remember, though technically I was there, in my high chair, eating mashed potatoes with a spoon. All five of us, in fact, were present, my mother eight months pregnant with a kicking, oversized male infant, Mike taking up as much space as possible even in the womb. The snug eat-in kitchen was stifling, filled with afternoon sun. Like most of our neighbors, we kept Raytheon hours. My mother put dinner on the table at five o'clock precisely. Dad's shift ended at four.

At dinnertime the radio played softly in the background—my mother kept it on all day, at low volume, as she cleaned or cooked or laundered. Marooned with a cranky toddler, she was profoundly lonely, yet she chose its staticky drone over the gossip of the neighborhood women, whose company she both longed for and scorned. She was the first to notice when Art began humming, the first wisps of his sweet falsetto. Even now, in her older years, she hears like a bat. Her foot would seek his under the table, a nudge of warning. But Art could not be stopped.

She glanced nervously at my father. His anger was a mercurial thing, sometimes gathering slowly, sometimes bursting forth without warning, a fast-moving storm. He drank then, but not as much as he would later. He might have stopped off for a quick one after work, no more. Yet even sober he had a temper. I say this not to shame him, but because his anger was a factor in Art's choices: my brother's place in the family and the reasons he left us, the sad trajectory of his priesthood. A factor, even, in his recent actions, ending in the events I'll get to soon.

G
RANTHAM IS
a seaside town, battered by weather. It occupies a narrow finger of land jutting into Boston Harbor, the outermost reaches of a cluster of suburbs known as the South Shore. At its thickest the finger is a half-mile wide, so that no house is more than a quarter mile from the ocean. To the west of the finger lies Boston Harbor. A commuter ferry crosses it four times a day, from Long Wharf in Boston to Grantham's Berkeley Pier. On the east side of town, grand old houses occupy the Atlantic beachfront, built when the town was a vacation spot for the wealthy. (You may have seen the famous photo of a future president, a blue-eyed urchin of three or four building a lopsided Camelot in Grantham sand.) Today the old Victorians are still standing, dark in winter, in season rented by the week. Year-round residents like my parents live in low Capes and ranches, covered in vinyl siding to cut down on the painting, though the salt air still takes a heavy toll on porches and windows and doors. The backyards are squared off by chain-link fences. The houses are tidy or ramshackle, depending on the street, but even the most derelict neighborhoods have a certain charm, gulls squawking, a seasmell I never noticed until I moved away. In stormy weather add the low moan of Grantham Light, the second oldest on the East Coast.

There are storms. It's impossible to describe Grantham without mentioning the wind. It is, I'm told, the windiest town in Massachusetts, no small distinction if you've witnessed Provincetown or Gloucester or Marblehead in a gale. I heard this from an insurance agent who, after the blizzard of '78, spent half the eighties processing claims for Grantham homeowners. In most months the wind is omnipresent, a constant ruffling, scratching, snuffling, as though a large pet, a zoo animal perhaps, were sleeping at the back door.

My parents' house is three blocks from the seawall, so by local standards they live inland. Like many places in town, theirs started out a Cape. The prior owner had added a second floor, two snug bedrooms that would soon belong to me and Mike. When I go back to visit, which isn't often, I am struck by the closeness of the place. Our living arrangements were so intimate that no cough or sneeze or bowel movement could go unnoticed. I fell asleep each night to the sound of my father's snoring, a low rumbling beneath the floorboards. Dad was the rhythm section, riffing along with the soprano gulls, the bass violin of Grantham Light, the percussive brush of the wild, wild wind.

In the eyes of the neighborhood we were a small family, made exotic by my mother's past. She had been married before, a brief teenage union that her uncle, also a priest, had used his influence to have annulled, though it had already produced a son. Her husband had disappeared into a bright Friday afternoon when Art was just a baby, for reasons that remain mysterious. According to Aunt Clare Boyle—not really my aunt, but a childhood friend of my mother's—he'd borrowed money from a South Boston shark only a fool would cross. It remains to this day a breaking story: fifty years on, the details are still subject to change. Clare, lonely in her old age, uses the information to attract visitors, serves it up a scrap at a time alongside the shortbread and milky tea.

The marriage itself was no secret—Art kept his father's surname, Breen—but it was a topic we didn't discuss. According to a raft of yellowed papers I found in Ma's attic, the Commonwealth granted her a divorce on grounds of abandonment, a fact never mentioned. She preferred the Church's explanation: the marriage had simply never occurred.

And so my father, Ted McGann, became Art's stepfather. At the time nobody used the idiotic term
blended family
. Maybe such households exist, but in our case, the label did not apply. We were two distinct families, unblended, the one simply grafted on to the other. I felt, always, that Art belonged to Ma and to his lost father, Mike to my own father and what I think of as Dad's tribe, who are noisy and numerous and in their own way impressive. Like them Mike is blond, square in the shoulders and jaw. He has the McGann restlessness, stubbornness, and stamina. It says something about him, and the way he lives his life, that he has never solved a problem by mere reflection. This goes a long way toward explaining his role in Art's story. He so resembles Dad that he seems to have no other parent. His DNA is pure McGann.

I have always been fascinated by heredity, the traits passed on from mother and father, the two sets of genes whirred together in a blender. Art and I favor our mother. From the time I was thirteen or fourteen, people have noticed the resemblance:
Ah, Mary, she's the picture of you at that age
. Always Ma dismissed the idea—quickly, prophylactically, as if afraid of where the conversation might lead. Once she turned to study me intently, as a stranger might.
Really?
she asked, as though she were seriously considering the possibility. And then:
I don't see it, myself.

Yet a few facts even Ma can't deny, such as our common height, our dark hair and pale freckled skin, our eyes that are sometimes green, sometimes brown. Ma and I have long faces, thin lips, sharp noses. These are features a woman must grow into: homely in childhood, plain in adolescence, attractive in middle age. Well into her sixties, my mother was finally quite striking, though the overall effect was not beauty, but a fierce kind of astuteness. Art's more generous features, his dimples and full mouth, must have come from his father. Because I have no way to verify this, not even a wedding picture, I am free to fill in the details as I like; and I like to think that there was something sweet and expansive in that man, Ma's first love.

As a child I felt caught between these two families: on the one hand Ma and Art, who
looked
like my relations; on the other Dad and Mike. I switched allegiances as it suited me, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

The wind, of course, being Dad.

My father's drinking, and his anger. Each fueled the other, though in which direction? Did he drink because he was angry, and or did he get angry when he drank?

Art was twelve when my parents married, and I can imagine how that affected him. My father, as I've suggested, is not an easy man, and here was a boy used to having his mother to himself. Ted McGann was twenty-four when he met Ma, just out of the Navy and, by Clare Boyle's account, looking for a good time. Why he got mixed up with an older woman (four years, to Aunt Clare, was a significant age difference), a woman who already had a child, was a Sorrowful Mystery for the ages.

Of course, Clare Boyle knows nothing about men.

I have seen photos of my mother at the time, her skirts shorter than I have ever seen her wear, her black hair long and loose. Where's the mystery? My parents were handsome people; they dated a few short months and quickly became engaged. If I know my mother at all, she kept Art clear of my father until the deal was closed, a habit she maintained throughout my childhood, perhaps unconsciously. Even now (especially now) her firstborn is a subject she and Dad don't discuss.

Art remembered little of their engagement, a fact I have always found significant. Before the wedding he met Ted a handful of times: a few Sunday dinners, an afternoon at the beach. Then the man moved into their apartment—they lived in town then, the top floor of a three-decker in Jamaica Plain—and soon I was born. A year later my parents bought the house in Grantham, and the following year Art went off to St. John's, the first step in his long journey to become a priest.