Faith. Jennifer Haigh

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      It’s a fight you’ll never win

      And now you bow your head in shame

      For a sin no one forgives

      —DROPKICK MURPHYS, “THIS IS YOUR LIFE”

      He lives for God, who lives by the Rule.

      —ST. BENEDICT

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Epigraph

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Part 1 - 2002

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Part 2 - May

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Chapter 36

      Chapter 37

      Chapter 38

      Chapter 39

      Chapter 40

      Chapter 41

      Chapter 42

      Chapter 43

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Also by Jennifer Haigh

      Copyright

      Credits

       About the Publisher

      Chapter 1

      Here is a story my mother has never told me.

      It is a day she’s relived a thousand times, the twenty-first of June, 1951, the longest day of that or any year. A day that still hasn’t ended, as some part of her still paces that dark apartment in Jamaica Plain, waiting. I imagine the curtains closed against the five o’clock sun, hot and bright as midday; her baby boy peacefully asleep; her young self with nothing to do but wander from room to room, still filled with her dead mother-in-law’s things.

      At the time she’d thought it a grand apartment, her from Roxbury where the children slept three to a bed. Even as a boy her husband had had his own bedroom, an unimaginable luxury. His mother had been injured somehow giving birth and there had been no more children. This fact alone made the Breens wealthier than most, though Harry’s father had only worked at Filene’s stacking crates in the warehouse. The entire apartment had come from Filene’s, on the employee discount, the lamps and brocade divan and what she had learned were called Oriental rugs. Mary herself had never bought a thing at Filene’s. Her own mother shopped at Sears.

      In the bedroom the baby slept deeply. She parted the curtains and let the sun shine on his face. Harry, when he came home, would pull them shut, worried someone might see him dressing or undressing through their third-floor windows. Sure, it was possible—the windows faced Pond Street, also lined with three-deckers—though why he cared was a puzzle. He was a man, after all. And there was nothing wrong with the sight of him. The first morning of their marriage, lying in the too-soft bed in the tourist cabin in Wellfleet, she had looked up at him in wonderment, her first time seeing him in daylight, his bare chest and shoulders, and her already four months along. Nothing wrong with him at all, her husband tall and blue-eyed, with shiny dark hair that fell into his eyes when he ducked his head, a habit left over from a bashful adolescence, though nobody, now, would call him shy. Harry Breen could talk to anyone. Behind the counter at Old Colony Hardware he had a way with the customers, got them going about their clogged pipes and screen doors and cabinets they were installing. He complimented their plans, suggested small improvements, sent them out the door with twice what they’d come in for. A natural salesman, never mind that he couldn’t, himself, hit a nail with a hammer. When a fuse blew at the apartment it was Mary who ventured into the dark basement with a flashlight.

      What did you do before? she’d asked, half astonished, when she returned to the lit apartment and found Harry and his mother sitting placidly in the kitchen, stirring sugar into teacups.

      We didn’t burn so many lights before, the old lady said.

      It was a reminder among many others that Mary’s presence was unwelcome, that Mrs. Breen, at least, had not invited her into their lives, this grimy interloper with her swollen belly and her skirts and blouses from Sears. As though her condition were a mystery on the order of the Virgin Birth, as though Harry СКАЧАТЬ