Faith. Jennifer Haigh

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ man stepped in close to her, smelling rankly of cigarette. “Sorry to miss that,” he said, and to her horror his rough hand touched her face.

      Arthur let out another hiccup and vomited in a great burst.

      “Jaysus!” The man stepped back, shaking his sleeve. It was coated in yellow spew.

      “Oh, no! I’m so sorry.” Mary took the towel from her shoulder and wiped uselessly at his sleeve. The smell was terrible, sour as vinegar. The man tore his hand away, eyeing the baby like a snake.

      “That’s a real charmer you’ve got there.” He turned to go. “Tell your man Shorty wants to see him.”

      She closed the door quickly behind him. The door, then the bolt, then the chain.

      TELL YOUR man Shorty wants to see him.

      He had never, in her memory, stayed out after dark. Only for the card games, and then he always told her beforehand: I’ve got the cards tonight, so don’t hold supper. I’ll have a sandwich or something at Taylor’s.

      If he stayed out all night, would she sit up waiting? Brushing her teeth a hundred strokes, a hundred strokes to her long dark hair. Always the counting calmed her—brushstrokes, rosary beads. Half the reason she loved the dancing was the counting of the steps. It gave her mind something to do.

      A strange fear gnawed at her stomach. For the first time she wished for a regular man, who’d go to a pub on a Friday. Then, at least, she’d know where to find him. But it was true what Shorty had said: Harry liked to keep a clear head. There was nothing to do but go to Old Colony Hardware. As detectives did in the radio serials: she would go to where Harry was last seen.

      I’ve been there, Shorty had said. He left hours ago.

      How many hours? she wondered. Where on earth could he have gone?

      She went to the telephone. “Is Father Egan in, please? This is his niece, Mary Breen.” The name new enough, still, to have an odd flavor on her tongue.

      “Wedding tonight,” the housekeeper said. “He’ll be back late. I can have him call you tomorrow.”

      “Yes, please,” Mary said.

      Arthur was cranky and lethargic, his arms and legs moist. She coaxed him into his clothes. Downstairs Mrs. Ruocco was already in her housecoat. She looked startled when Mary came to the door.

      “It’s my father,” Mary said. “I have to go see him in the hospital. Could you look after the baby, please?”

      Her father was dead five years already, and couldn’t be hurt by her lie.

      How light she felt, walking up the street with no baby in her arms. She had done it her whole life and never realized. Old Colony Hardware was closed, of course, the metal grille pulled shut in front. Upstairs was an office and a storeroom. Both sets of windows were dark.

      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.

      Chapter 2

      June 1, 2004

      Most 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 СКАЧАТЬ