Faith. Jennifer Haigh

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      • • •

      IF YOU aren’t Catholic—or maybe especially if you are—you have wondered what possesses a young man to choose that life, with its elaborate privations. I have asked Art this question, expecting the boilerplate Church response, that priests are called by God. His answer surprised me. It helps, he said, to be a child, with little understanding of what he is forfeiting. Love to marriage to home and family: connect those dots, and you get the approximate shape of most people’s lives. Take them away, and you lose any hope for connection. You give up your place in the world.

      His words startled me, the deep weariness in his voice. We were speaking by phone late one night, a few years back. I have tried to date the conversation, with no success. We are both nocturnal, and likely spoke after midnight. But was it five years ago, or four, or three? Had he already met Kath Conlon and her son?

      We became close in adulthood, a fact my younger self would have found surprising. Art had been a fixture in my early life, a regular presence at family gatherings; but our childhoods had scarcely overlapped; we never shared the noisy, grubby intimacy I had with Mike. My younger brother tells a story about his own fourth birthday. (Can he really remember that far back? Or is he merely conjuring up a photo from the family album, one I also recall: Mike sitting regally in his high chair, a chubby potentate; before him a decorated cake, a candle shaped like the number 4.) Art had brought him a toy, a stuffed giraffe with a ribbon round its neck, and Mike knew to say thank you even though it was nothing he wanted, a gift for a baby or, maybe, a girl. He had hesitated, unsure how to address the man in black. The aunts and uncles called him “Father.” Yet Art was also his brother. None of it had made sense.

      I felt a similar confusion. My deeper closeness with Art coincided with my move to Philadelphia and, not accidentally, the end of my churchgoing. It was easier to think of Art as a brother the less I thought about his work, and in Philly I had no contact with priests. I once phoned Art in mid-August and asked, innocently, how he’d spent his day. I’d forgotten it was the feast of the Assumption, though the Holy Days of Obligation had been drummed into my head from an early age. We both knew then that I had left the fold forever. Except for the one time, which I’ll get to later, he never tried to coax me back.

      It seems, now, that I should have seen trouble coming. But Art had been a priest for twenty-five years; moreover, he had never been anything else. I understood that his life lacked certain kinds of human closeness, but then so did mine. I’d recently placed a down payment on a studio apartment, a large sunny room at the top of an old row house. In Philadelphia it was all the space a high school teacher could afford, and all I could imagine needing, a concrete commitment to the path I’d been following quietly for years. I’d tried marriage—briefly, disastrously—and was divorced with a slice of wedding cake still in my freezer, awaiting our first anniversary. It had long appeared likely, and at last seemed decided, that I would always live alone.

      Was it my own loneliness that made Art’s invisible? I wouldn’t have said he was unhappy being a priest. I was present the Sunday he gave his first homily and I can still remember his ease at the pulpit. Years of parochial schooling had overexposed me to sermons, but Art’s were unlike any I’d heard. His style was gentle and humorous, slyly persuasive. He was so thoughtful and engaging that I might have listened to him anyway, even if he weren’t my brother. His new life fit him. Singing the Kyrie, he seemed to glow with a deep contentment, his rich tenor filling the small chapel, his eyes closed in prayer. Unusual, and gratuitous, to sing it in Latin: I understood this was a private gift to my mother. I turned to look at her sitting behind me, her eyes full.

      How alive he seemed to me then, how exhilarated by his first baptism, first wedding, first midnight Mass. But these are old memories. In recent years he scarcely spoke of his work. Our conversations revolved around family news, the aches and illnesses of our aging parents, Mike’s marriage and the births of his three sons. Art never expressed regrets, not explicitly; but of course he had them. Show me a man of fifty who doesn’t regret the lives he hasn’t lived.

      I read over what I’ve written—of course he had them—and am ashamed of myself, the words seem so smug and facile. How easily I dismiss his sorrows, the griefs and losses that haunted him. The truth is that I loved Art, and that I failed him, in ways that will become clear.

      For the first few months I tracked the scandal. Soon the reports referred to Art’s case only in passing, and I realized that the story was much larger than my brother. At minimum it involved the entire Boston Archdiocese, hundreds of victims, dozens of priests. Day after day, until I could swallow no more, I ingested the queasy details, nicely organized in timelines and bullet points. The reporters didn’t strike me as biased, and one could hardly accuse them of laziness. One persistent fellow dogged my poor parents for months. I don’t believe, as my mother still does, that the press set out to make Art a monster. The accusations themselves were monstrous. And the evidence either way—of his guilt or innocence—was very slim.

      And whose fault is that? a small voice asks me. It isn’t God’s voice or my brother’s, but the voice of my own conscience, which I have ignored successfully for some time. I have kept Art’s secrets. My excuse until now has been loyalty. Art asked that I tell no one, and I have kept my word.

      Two years have passed since the events of that spring—a calendar spring, equinox to solstice; three months that, in New England, can feel like summer or winter. My parents still live in Grantham. On the surface their lives are unchanged. But my mother no longer attends daily Mass, or cleans the church rectory or pours coffee at parish dinners. On Sundays she sits alone in a rear pew, her head bowed. (My father won’t set foot in a church, but that’s nothing to do with Art. He hasn’t been to Mass in years.) Kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, Ma prays only for her Arthur, that God in His mercy will forgive whatever he has done.

      Lately I visit Grantham without seeing my parents. I’ve never done this before, but then I’ve never had any reason to go back beyond guilt and a vague sense of obligation. Now I sleep on the foldout couch in Mike’s finished basement, waking at dawn when my three nephews clamber down the stairs to play video games at high volume. I pay visits to Art’s former church and rectory, and to those who knew him at that time: the church council; the parish housekeeper; the few diocesan priests willing to talk to me, only one of whom Art might have called a friend. We meet away from their rectories, at Dunkin’ Donuts outlets deep in the suburbs, at diners, at bars. It is a function of my upbringing that I find it unsettling to drink with a priest. Certainly my mother would be mortified at the thought. Recent events have done nothing to dim her admiration of these men, and yet her encounters with them—at Legion of Mary bake sales, the annual Christmas luncheon of the local Catholic Daughters of the Americas—are fraught with anxiety. Three years ago—just before Art’s СКАЧАТЬ