Faith. Jennifer Haigh

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СКАЧАТЬ according to Mike, who sat beside her, at the dinner afterward she was nervous as a cat. Introduced to a series of friendly men in clerical collars, she flushed and stammered, stricken with embarrassment.

      What she fears—I know this—is exposure. Of her own sins, real or imagined; her and my father’s secret shames. After I have told Art’s story, it’s possible, likely even, that she will never speak to me again. Foolishly maybe, I hope otherwise. In my fantasy we sit together in her quiet kitchen, just us two. I open my heart to her and lay it on the table between us. I am still child enough to wish it were possible, adult enough to know it isn’t. We are too much ourselves, the people we have always been.

      THE BIBLE offers four accounts of the life of Jesus, told by four different writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. God’s Beatles wrote in different languages, in different centuries. Each saw the story in his own terms. Matthew had a particular interest in Jesus’s childhood. Mark cared mainly about the endgame, the betrayal, crucifixion and death. Only Luke—who never met Our Lord—mentions the two famous parables, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. John’s gospel is full of miracles and revelations, the raising of Lazarus, its own charmed poetry. I am the Light of the world. I am the true Vine. Abide in me.

      The story of my family likewise changes with the teller. Ma’s version focuses on the early years. (Each year at our birthdays we were treated to our own nativity stories—Art the preemie, Mike the breech birth, myself the induced labor—as though she were trying to decide, once and for all, which child had caused her the greatest misery in coming into the world.) Mike’s gospel is terse and action-packed; like the apostle Mark, he cuts to the chase. Clare Boyle’s tale, if she’ll tell it, is full of innuendo and hearsay. Like Luke, she merely repeats what she’s heard.

      Art was our apostle John.

      For most of my life, I have refused to take part in the telling. In some way this was an act of rebellion. I was eighteen when I moved away from Boston, and I’d had enough of the McGann family lore. But recent events have changed my thinking, and I offer here my own version of the story, a kind of fifth gospel. The early pages borrow heavily from other accounts. The miracles and revelations will come later, the stories never before told.

      So, to those who remained loyal to my brother, and those who didn’t: here is his story as far as I know it, what Art told me at the time and what I found out later, and what I still can’t verify but know in my heart to be true. In many cases I have re-created events I did not witness. There was nothing sophisticated in my method. I simply worked out what certain people must have said or felt, a task made easier by the fact that the two leading men were my brothers—one who confided in me, if belatedly and selectively; the other so deeply familiar that I can nearly channel his thoughts. This isn’t as extraordinary as it sounds. It’s mainly a function of his consistent character that in any given situation, I can predict, with dependable accuracy, what Mike would say and do. As for the other actors in the story, I have done my best, relying occasionally on the memories of people who may have reason to mislead me. Where their recollections seem dubious, I have noted this. In the end I believe that I have reported events fairly. So much has been spoiled and lost that there is no longer any reason to prevaricate.

      Why would anyone go to such lengths to tell this sorry tale? It’s a fair question, and the answer is that no one would, unless she’d felt God’s presence and then His absence; once believed, and later failed and doubted. A sister might tell it, a sister sick with regret.

      Art’s story is, to me, the story of my own family, with all its darts and dodges and mysterious omissions: the open secrets long unacknowledged, the dark relics never unearthed. I understand, now, that Art’s life was ruined by secrecy, a familial failing; and that I played a part in his downfall—a minor role, to be sure, and a third-act entrance; but a role nonetheless. There is no healing my brother, not now; and Aidan Conlon is a child still; it’s too soon to tell what his future holds. So maybe it’s for myself that I make this public act of contrition. My penance is to tell this ragged truth as completely as I know it, fully aware that it is much too little, much too late.

      Chapter 3

      The story begins on a bright afternoon many years ago, one I remember as though I’d seen it. (This is natural enough in a family like ours, with its canon of approved stories. They are told in the manner of repertory theater: hang around long enough and you’ll hear them all.) Imagine the trees tinged with red, a sky so clear it seems contrived, the high blue heaven of tourist brochures. It is the first resplendent day of a New England fall, and Ma’s new husband is driving from Grantham to Brighton, his hand on her thigh. They are dressed for a wedding or a funeral: she in Sunday hat and gloves, he grudgingly coaxed into a suit. In the backseat is a battered footlocker from his Navy days, packed with the few possessions a junior seminarian is allowed. Squeezed in beside it is Art, fourteen years old, staring out at a scene that will shape the rest of his life: the headquarters of the Boston Archdiocese and its famous seminary, St. John’s.

      The decision to come here had been his alone. From the age of ten he’d served as an altar boy. Two mornings a week he’d met Father Cronin in the vestry at St. Dymphna’s, helped him into his chasuble and alb. At the altar Art genuflected, lit candles, carried cruets. At Consecration he rang the bells. The sound never failed to send him soaring, a feeling that was nearly indescribable: a sweet exhilaration, a spreading warmth. In those moments he’d sensed a transformation occurring, before him and inside him. Bread and wine into the Body and Blood. An ordinary boy into something else.

      In the confessional Father Cronin posed the question. Have you ever considered it? They discussed at some length what a vocation felt like, how you could ever be sure. Certainty will come later, the priest promised. And one Sunday after Mass, he invited Ma to the rectory for a chat.

      Now, washed and waxed for the occasion, Dad’s car passed through the stone gates. A few others were already parked behind the dormitory, a cavernous brick building perched atop a hill. Ted hefted the trunk to his shoulder and with much grumbling hauled it up three flights of stairs, down a long corridor to the cell Art would share with a boy named Ray Cousins. (I do not invent this: in those days at least, seminarians, like prisoners, slept in cells.)

      Like all others on the third floor, Art’s cell was small and square. In it were two narrow beds, two wooden desks. The floors were bare; metal blinds hung at the one window. There were no rugs—a fact my mother emphasizes in the telling—and no curtains. No trace, anywhere, of anything soft.

      Dad set down the trunk. Ma was uncharacteristically silent, her eyes welling. It was the moment Art had dreaded for months.

      “I’ll be fine,” he said, embracing her. “I’ll write you.” Briefly he shook Ted’s hand.

      I SHOULD say a few words about that campus, which figures so prominently in the life and ministry of my brother. How those buildings came to be is a story in itself. For the nearly forty years that William Cardinal O’Connell ran the Archdiocese, Boston was the capital of Catholic America, and in his eyes it deserved a facciata as grand as the Vatican. “Little Rome,” the local papers called it, the hills of Brighton dotted with monuments: the seminary’s neoclassic library and exquisite chapel, the elegant palazzo where the Cardinal slept and the ostentatious mausoleum where he sleeps now. At the entrance of each building was carved the Cardinal’s own motto, Vigor in Arduis.

      Strength Amid Difficulties.

      It was, in every way, the house O’Connell had built.

      Art was barely a teenager when he arrived there, and for twelve years it was—not his home, exactly, but as close to one as an aspiring priest was allowed. Later I would visit him there. Together we walked its landscaped hills, its winding footpaths. Art showed me a shady grove of cedars that hid a secret: a round swimming pool, long СКАЧАТЬ