Faith (24 page)

T
he green envelope contained two letters. One was addressed to me. Judging by the handwriting—still firm and decisive—I'd guess Art wrote this one first.

You were a rare child, and are a rare woman. Never fear the part of you that is extraordinary. You are God's child still.

There was more, of course; but they were my brother's last words to me, and I am not willing to share them. It's enough to say that the letter was full of regrets and blessings, and one final request.

Sheila, I know you'll do this for me. There's nobody else I can ask.

The other, longer letter—truly a lost gospel—was addressed to Kath.

In the lobby at Dover Court is a large brass mailbox, thirty-six steps—I have counted—from Art's front door. How easy it would have been, even in a drugged stupor, to walk from apartment to elevator to lobby and back again, to entrust to the United States Postal Service this final, critical task.

Instead Art placed Kath's letter, and mine, in the green envelope. Both unsealed. I believe he meant for me to read them both, and that is what I did.

T
he human heart: its expansions and contractions, its electrics and hydraulics, the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance, from many perspectives—the engaged couples appearing at his rectory; the middle-aged spouses seeking counsel; the widows and widowers numb with grief or relief. Father Breen listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

For years he had shrunk from their moist human anguish. Their needs were troubling symptoms, of an illness to which he was blessedly immune. It was a secret he'd carried since childhood: sexual need, that most primal instinct, was simply beyond him, a drive he had never felt.

Could he love as other men loved?

His whole life he'd been haunted by the question. He'd concluded, finally, that he was broken—the mechanism frozen by disuse or by something more sinister, the trauma he'd suffered as a child. He was not insensible to beauty. The Cindy Clays of the world, its lilac-scented females, were a pleasure to behold. But his response was aesthetic rather than erotic: a weak mimicry of desire, a cool appreciation of what would move another man, a normal man, to his core. Other men could be gripped by this yearning, ruled by it, ruined by it. From a distance Art had seen the grim consequences. Through marriages and families it scorched a devastated trail.

There was celibacy, and there was chastity. At seminary he'd learned they were two different things. A celibate priest had no sexual contact with anybody. But what about his private thoughts, what he did when he was alone? Chastity, it was explained, was a loftier goal: perfect self-containment, complete purity in thought, word and deed. After urging the boys to mind their
vessels
, Father Koval had acknowledged that chastity was a tall order, a level of mastery few men could ever attain. Hearing this, young Arthur Breen had felt a certain smugness: he would be one of the exalted few. In those years his frigidity had seemed a rare talent, a gift like his celibacy; it was the original gift that made the other possible. He'd imagined it, even, a kind of superpower, like flying or X-ray vision—an ability denied to ordinary men.

Later he was ashamed of his hubris. First year of seminary, the
Confessions
of St. Augustine:
To abstain from sin when one cannot sin is to be forsaken by sin, not to forsake it.
Gradually he came to see himself as stunted, maimed like the poor
castrati
, their manhood stolen. Not extraordinary, but less, much less, than ordinary.

Could he love as other men loved?

The doubt was always with him, buried like some dark evidence. As though asking the question were itself a crime.

Y
EARS AGO,
his anxieties had come to the surface. He was stationed, then, at St. Rose of Lima, and made daily visits to the parish school. When a fifth-grade teacher was hospitalized with pneumonia, Art took over her classroom, teaching religion and music. A male teacher was a novelty at St. Rose, and the children idolized him—the boys especially, after so many years of being minded by nuns.

They were the happiest months of his ministry. Teaching satisfied him deeply: the affection of his small pupils, the camaraderie of the faculty lounge. His colleagues welcomed him. A pretty math teacher named April Horner even flirted a little, and Art allowed himself this small diversion. There was nothing in the Rule against having an attractive friend.

For the first time in his adult life, he took a hard look at his future. To his surprise he saw not a single road, but a maze of highways, interconnecting. There was no telling where they might lead. Alone, late at night, he imagined a different life at St. Rose, not as a priest but as a lay teacher. His own apartment, April Horner his girlfriend. (Was he attracted to her? The question plagued him. He'd been willing—almost—to find out.)

Then, halfway through the school year, he saw a news report on television: a preschool in California, its entire staff marched away in handcuffs. A whole team of Ferguses, apparently, with daily access to children. Quickly Art turned off the television, as though the image burned his eyes.

The events of his childhood had never left him. Instead the memory had grown watery, indistinct, like something he'd dreamed.
Abused, molested
: these were not terms he used, even to himself. When he recalled those Saturday afternoons—which wasn't often—he had no vocabulary to describe what had happened. His uncle's name,
Fergus
, became shorthand for the act.

Now, suddenly, the story was everywhere: newspapers, magazines. Wherever he turned, a psychologist was discussing
pedophilia.
Undoubtedly he'd heard the term before, but never with such numbing frequency. Again and again he heard the assertion—made with
ex cathedra
assurance—that abuse begot abusers. That a child who'd been molested would grow up to do the same. In psychological circles this was apparently common knowledge, but to Art it was a shattering discovery. His potential career as teacher, his new life at St. Rose: he saw them, suddenly, through different eyes. His fondness for his pupils, the comfort and delight he took in their company: what dark needs drove him to crave their attention?

Children and women, women and children. He spurned them, now, for corollary reasons: he feared being drawn to one, and feeling nothing for the other. In pastoral life, both were easy to avoid. He hid behind his cassock and his confessional. The altar boys he entrusted to colleagues. The schoolchildren he left strictly to the nuns.

This system served him even as it isolated him—until that spring day in 2001, when Kath Conlon appeared at his rectory with her son.

T
HEY SWEPT
into his life like weather, a sudden nor'easter: the beginning of his
annus mirabilis.

Year of wonders.

“Father, I want you to meet someone. This is my daughter, Kathleen.”

The morning was balmy, almost summerlike; yet as they stood at his office window, watching the boy rushed by seagulls, he had sensed her shivering beside him. Her eyes were bloodshot, her complexion ashen. From his time among the homeless of the South End, he remembered the signs of intoxication. He saw instantly that she was high.

“Are you all right?” he asked softly.

Her eyes darted toward him, then away. “Yeah. Fine. Why?”

“Does Fran know you're using?”

“I'm
not.
” She glanced furtively out the window. “Jesus, it's nothing. I ran into someone at a party. Are you going to tell her?”

“Give me one reason I shouldn't.”

“She'll call the cops. I just got off probation. They could take my kid.”

In the kitchen the screen door slammed. Fran's heavy tread on the linoleum, Aidan scampering ahead.

“Please,” Kath whispered.

“I'm watching you,” Art said.

F
ROM THE
first she had tested him: all that the cassock demanded, and all that it forbade. For years he'd complained to Clem Fleury that he felt irrelevant—at weddings and funerals, a bit player in black clericals; a droll little penguin at council meetings and bingo games. Now he found himself in a genuine moral quandary. What he did next, or failed to do, would have tangible consequences—for Kath and her son, for Fran and for himself.

Your daughter is on drugs
, he might have said as Fran entered the room.

Instead he stepped up and took the boy's hand.

He kept his promise: he watched her. Whenever possible he watched her son. That day, leading Aidan across the schoolyard, Art had plied him with gentle questions. Did his mother stay up late? Sleep all day? Did she disappear into the bathroom for long stretches, locking the door behind her?

“She used to,” Aidan admitted. “Not no more.”

“Not
any
more.” For reasons he couldn't have explained, the grammatical error delighted him. And Art, who hadn't touched a child in many years, tousled the boy's hair.

It amazed him, in retrospect, how quickly he'd become enmeshed in their lives. With much huffing and puffing he moved their furniture into the new apartment he'd found for her—in a safe neighborhood, a cheap but decent part of Dunster. Importantly, it was on the bus line to Dorchester, so that when her Buick died she'd have a way to work. She had bought the car over Art's objections. When the timing belt went, it was Art who paid to have it replaced.

While her car was in the shop, he got into the habit of driving Aidan home from the rectory in the evenings. Tuesday and Friday nights, while Kath attended AA meetings, Art read to the boy and put him to bed. Then he made a discreet inspection of the apartment. He opened drawers and cupboards, inventoried the medicine chest. He knew roughly what to look for: needles, spoons, rolling papers. Though what exactly he'd do if he found them, he had no idea.

For Aidan
, he told himself as he crept into Kath's bedroom. The bed was neatly made with a flowered quilt. As he pulled back the sheet and felt under the mattress, a memory came to him unbidden, his mother folding her nightgown and tucking it beneath the pillow. A pure flash of his own boyhood, forgotten these forty years.

Under Kath's pillow he found a silky black camisole. His cheeks flaming, he replaced it and remade the bed.

The dresser top was littered with perfumes and lotions, a lighted mirror for makeup. It was an item he associated with actresses, chorus girls. He remembered that she had been a dancer. In San Diego, in rooms full of strange men, she had taken off her clothes.

That night they sat in her kitchen drinking coffee. Like Art she was a night owl, immune to the effects of caffeine.

“What was it like?” he asked her. “The first time you did it.”

“Cold,” she said.

Aha
, he thought. His attempts to counsel her had so far been fruitless. He had found her impermeable, hard-shelled like a crab. Now—at long last—he detected remorse.

“Cold in what way?” he asked gently, intending to draw her out. It would be therapeutic, he felt. Probably she'd never spoken about what she'd suffered, the soul-chilling anomie
.

She had done a tryout for the club's owner, brought with her a tape of a song she liked. An old one; maybe he'd remember it. Had he ever listened to Luna Sky?

“No,” Art said.

Anyway. It was late afternoon, summertime. Outside the sun was blazing, but the club was fucken freezing. Only the stage was warm, like being under a French fry lamp. Kath was always glad to step out on stage, glad to be in the light.

Against his will Art pictured it, her slim body swaying and writhing. I shouldn't be listening to this, he thought. But he was determined, still, to counsel her, to prove himself equal to the task.

“But wasn't it—demeaning? To be ogled by strangers. Men who don't know you, or care about you.” He had never felt less equipped to counsel anyone. Had never felt more acutely what he was: a middle-aged epicene, a castrato, a prig.

Kath eyed him irritably. “Oh, Jesus. What are you, my father?”

Had he ever been misread so completely? Art was both offended and relieved. Never in his life had he felt less fatherly. Yet, in this instance, it was far better to be misconstrued.

L
ONG EVENINGS
at her kitchen table, the boy asleep in the next room. After that one attempt, he did not ask about her past. Instead he focused on the future. What sort of life did she want for her and Aidan? Had she considered continuing her education? What did she believe God wanted for her?

Her responses were frustratingly opaque. By nature or necessity she refused self-examination. “I don't think about that shit. That stuff,” she corrected herself. “I live in the moment, you know? At AA they tell you to take one day at a time.”

Art tried a different tack: What did she want for Aidan?

“To be somebody,” she said promptly. Not like herself or her older brothers—one a prison guard at Walpole, the other chronically unemployed. She grinned slyly. “Maybe he could be a priest.”

Was she mocking him?

“Is that something you would want for him?” he asked cautiously.

“Why not?” she said. “He's smart, like you.”

“Me?” Pleasure flooded him like liquid filling a glass.

“You're the smartest person I know.” She smiled then, a genuine smile, free of mockery. She had a lovely smile.

“It isn't an easy life,” he said softly. He'd been careful, always, to keep himself out of their conversations. Through pointed questions he had controlled the dialogue. Kath hadn't minded, or perhaps hadn't noticed. She had never asked a single question about him.

“It's a solitary life.” He chose his words carefully, consciously avoiding the word
lonely.
“It demands a certain temperament. I suppose it helps to be a loner.”

“Is that what you are?”

“At one time I thought so. Now I'm not so sure.” He looked down into his cup. “It gets harder with age. Priests make a great many sacrifices. I'm very aware of all I have missed.”

“Like what?” said Kath, her eyes serious. For once she wasn't teasing him.

He looked around the apartment, Aidan's drawings on the refrigerator, his small shoes and Kath's sandals lined up neatly at the door. “I'll never have what you have. A family. I would have liked that.” He had never said the words aloud. As he did, he realized they were true.

“You would have been a great father,” she said. “Aidan loves you.”

They sat there a long moment. But for Art the silence was charged with emotion. He wondered if Kath felt it, too. How did anyone know, ever, what another person was feeling? As a priest he had rarely wondered. Laypeople—he saw it now—lived much more complicated lives.