Faith (26 page)

“I'm sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I wasn't going to get high. I don't even like that shit. It's like being dead, except you're awake for it.”

“So what were you planning to do with it?”

“What do you think?” She didn't add
you idiot
, but her tone implied it. “There's, what, ten of them? I could get fifty bucks a pill.”

He stared at her stupefied. “Kathleen, have you lost your mind?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” She did not flinch from his gaze. “I'm behind on the rent, okay? And there's Aidan's tuition. School starts next week.”

“I told you, I'll take care of that.”

“Then how come I keep getting bills in the mail?”

Art flushed. For months, now, he'd postponed the conversation with Father Money.
My housekeeper's daughter. No, she's not a parishioner. And she hasn't been paying a dime.

“Forget about tuition,” he said. “I promise. I'll find a way.”

“It's more than that. It's everything. No matter what I do, I'm always behind. And it's
never going to get better.
” To his shock, her eyes filled with tears. “I'm doing everything right, you know? I'm working. I'm not using.”

“I know,” Art said.

“I can't keep this up,” she said, her voice ragged. “You don't get it. It's
too fucken hard.
”

Her shoulders shook with sobs. He took her into his arms.

W
HAT HAPPENED
next should not have happened. Having happened, it is not for a sister to know. And yet I believe Art wanted me to know it. He wanted somebody to understand.

He kissed her hungrily, as if for nourishment. Later it would seem to him an act of cannibalism; the law he violated seemed nearly that ancient. But that night he was beyond reason, a man too long starved.

“Help me,” he whispered. “I don't know what to do.”

It wasn't precisely true. After the first moments instinct took over, itself a revelation; it was an instinct he'd doubted he possessed. A lifetime's doubt and anguish dispelled—was it possible?—in a matter of minutes. Less than an hour had passed since he'd parked the car on Fenno Street. In that hour three lives were changed forever: his own and Kathleen's, but Aidan's, too, in ways he couldn't have foreseen and wouldn't have believed if he had.

He made love to her. This was my brother's transgression. He made love to a woman, and in so doing abandoned all he had promised and all he believed. Afterward, creeping out of Kath Conlon's apartment, conspicuous as a traffic cone in the ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, he wore his crime like a brand.

He had broken his covenant. He wasn't the first priest to fall, as Clem Fleury would remind him later. One needn't reach as far back as Alexander VI, the Renaissance pope who'd fathered eight children. Of Art's own graduating class at St. John's, two had already left the priesthood. How many others had lapsed in secret? It was impossible to know.

But the sin itself—it was that, too, a sin as well as a promise broken—wasn't the worst of it. He had taken advantage of a distraught and damaged young woman who trusted him, a girl who'd placed herself, and her child, in his care. Like so many men before him, he had exploited her weakness. He was no better—in fact much worse—than the men in San Diego buying lap dances in the dark, curtained booths. Her whole life Kath Conlon had been desired by men, used and discarded. It was a fraternity Art never imagined he'd join.

At long last the question was answered. Arthur Breen could love as other men loved. In the end, he was no more and no less than a man.

•  •  •

D
AYS PASSED.
Art didn't see her, didn't call. He explained to Fran that he'd be spending the Labor Day weekend with his sister, me, in Philadelphia. Aidan could spend the days, as usual, at the rectory, in his grandmother's care.

That visit—the first time Art had shown up in Philly without warning—caught me completely off guard. I was amused by this burst of midlife spontaneity, glad to see him roll up in his battered Honda. (Diocesan priests take no vow of poverty, as many people believe; they are simply underpaid.) We rented him a bike and spent an afternoon cycling in Pennypack Park. Art's breathlessness, after thirty years of smoking, concerned but did not surprise me. I remember thinking, Thank God he finally quit. I can't recall him coughing, but I suppose that came later. He wouldn't be diagnosed for another eight months.

His mood that weekend was peculiar, a reckless gaiety I found alarming. We drank pots of strong coffee. Art seemed antsy and distracted, dying for a cigarette. Only alcohol seemed to calm him. That Saturday night, sitting on my roof to escape the heat, we opened a bottle of wine and made plans for the following day, an outdoor arts festival in New Hope. Art asked me—jokingly, I thought—the time of the morning Mass.

“There's a church down the street,” I said. “It might be Catholic. Wake me up when you get back.”

I laughed, but Art didn't.

“Don't you miss it?” he said.

“What, church?”

“Faith.”

He eyed me intently, waiting. Amazingly, it was a conversation we'd never had.

“I wonder if I could live without it,” he said. “I don't think I could.”

He spoke softly, his voice vibrating with emotion. I refilled his glass.

“I'm not like you, Art. I'm not sure I ever had it.”

“You did. I remember.” And then: “Your closet.”

At this I flushed red. At age ten I'd set up a secret altar in my bedroom closet, an idea I'd cribbed from a book: in
Little Women
, the youngest of the March sisters had done the same. My own altar was a footstool laid with rosary beads and a porcelain Virgin Mary, First Communion gifts from Clare Boyle. I sat there each morning saying a rosary—even at my size, kneeling was impossible in the cramped space. I remember feeling strangely elated as I prayed in secret, as though this were a forbidden activity. In fact it was anything but—Ma would have been overjoyed to see me with rosary beads, which was precisely the reason I hid them. Only when I prayed in secret did the prayer belong to me.

“You knew about that?” Nearly thirty years later, the memory was still embarrassing. I worried what it said about me. At best it seemed to point to some intrinsic foolishness, a deep-seated eccentricity that lurked within me still.

“Ma told me,” said Art. “I thought it was extraordinary.”

“I thought nobody knew.” I drained my glass, longing to be drunker. Longing, suddenly, for Art to disappear, or to disappear myself.

How I wish, now, that we had continued that conversation. Instead, eager for escape, I dragged Art on a pub crawl. In Manayunk the crowds were noisy and lively, and Art drank a great deal. I know now that he was thinking of Kath Conlon, trying by the time-tested method to obliterate all thought of her. I imagine her waiting for him back in Dunster, in a state of high anxiety: picking up Aidan at the rectory every night, willing the phone to ring. My heart aches for her. I am, myself, no stranger to this waiting, the charged and terrible uncertainty that follows the surrender to passion—this dangling in limbo, waiting, waiting for a man to call. It's a pale shadow, I suspect, of what Kath Conlon must have felt that weekend. Like me she is descended from a long line of Catholic daughters: virgins cast from the same mold, fired in the same oven. My own faith is a relic kept under glass, a holy curiosity like the bones of a saint. But whatever apostasy I may now affect, I blanch at the very thought of

(it is nearly unspeakable)

going to bed with a priest.

T
HEY NEVER
discussed what had happened between them. For Kath this was only briefly surprising, as her experience in this arena is vast. I am speaking not just of sex, but of heartbreak and disappointment, a long series of nocturnal lovers scattering like roaches in the light. And yet nothing in her barbed history had cut her so sharply. Of all her wounds this was the deepest, one that may never heal.

The ironies here are too many to count. To Art, especially, they should have been obvious, Art who too had been wronged by a priest.

I don't mean to equate their affair—if that is what it was—with that earlier horror. Of course they are not the same. Art and Kath were both adults (though it's possible to argue that one was as inexperienced as a child, the other as reckless and raw). And yet there's no denying that these events generated a tidal wave of confusion and shame, and neither party was much of a swimmer. My brother drove back from Philly with a raging hangover, fighting Labor Day traffic. That Tuesday morning was the first day of school. At the rectory Art watched from his bedroom window, waiting for the boy to appear.

Later he found out that Aidan hadn't enrolled at Sacred Heart. At his mother's request, Sister Ursula had sent his transcript to the Dunster public schools.

Had I known that weekend what I have since discovered, I'd have turned Art away from my doorstep.
Go back to Dunster. Talk to her.
But I didn't, and he didn't; and his silence, more than anything, made Kath vulnerable to dark imaginings. In the end she cast him, as women will, in the most sinister light. He cared nothing for her; he blamed her for seducing him. Or—worse—he didn't blame her at all. She was nothing to him, interchangeable with any number of female parishioners he'd hit on, lonely fucked-up women so desperate for male attention that they'd do it with anyone, even a priest.

Art's silence was his great failure. In the Church's eyes it doesn't compare in magnitude to the sin of bedding Kath Conlon, but I am a woman, scarred in my own ways, and to me it is nearly as great. Because I am not Kath, I can forgive him. I understand that he ran from her not because the act had meant so little to him, but because it had meant so much. That night he'd glimpsed, however briefly, a sweetly exalted human happiness he'd only read about, Art who'd spent his whole life reading about apparitions. In those few moments he knew genuine tenderness, given and received. He experienced grace. If it sounds like heresy, I am far past caring: for my brother, making love to Kath was a reflection of divine love, a brief flash of God alive in the world.

If Art had been able to speak, this is what he would have told her.

By now you, reader, know Kath as well as I do. What she would have made of such a profession is impossible to say. Yet the consequences couldn't have been grimmer than what eventually did happen. Kath's shame and agitation hardened into anger. And months later, when Kevin Vick spotted a headline in the paper and had a wild idea, her anger found, at last, its object.

“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

B
ecause I loved him, I have tried to imagine a different outcome for my brother: Art turning away from his life's work, the solemn promises he'd made; Art making a sharp detour—
banging a Uey—
to build a new life with Kath and her son. I have wished for him the only sort of happiness my secular mind can conceive of, the kind created by and between human beings who love. Art, himself, longed for this. On the night he made love to Kath Conlon, and in the weeks and months that followed, he dreamed of a home with her and Aidan, the family they might make. Ever passive, my brother waited. He prayed for guidance, for clarity. He sought counsel from Clement Fleury. Summer faded into fall.

What stopped him, in the end, were not the obvious obstacles: that Kath was young enough to be his daughter; as unsuited to him, intellectually and emotionally, as any woman on earth. His spiritual commitments; the covenant he'd made: even these, in the end, were beside the point.

That winter he came down with his usual bronchitis, the worst he'd ever suffered. Even after his fever broke, his deep cough would not resolve. Beginning in spring his datebook is filled with medical appointments: weeks apart, and then with accelerating frequency.

What stopped him, in the end, was what stops everybody. He simply ran out of time.

T
he day after Art's funeral, I drove my father's truck to Dover Court. I didn't have to do this, not yet. Art's rent was paid through the end of October; so objectively there was no hurry. And yet I felt drawn to the spot where my brother had ended his life. I am Irish enough to believe that the dying leave some bit of themselves behind, some animate residue that does not linger. I didn't want to wait too long.

The apartment was eerily quiet. For the second time I packed Art's clothes in boxes. A book, covered in library plastic, lay open beside his air mattress—one he'd read many times, Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose.
He had turned to it again, in extremis
.
I imagined him reading late at night, unable to lose himself in sleep.

The kitchen was tidy and nearly empty. A few clean dishes—a spoon, a saucer—had been set on a towel to dry. In the refrigerator I found instant coffee and canned soup. Art may not have known that these items don't require refrigeration. I have never known anyone less adept in the kitchen. His whole adult life there'd been someone to feed him: the invisible nuns who staffed the refectory at St. John's; kindly women like Fran Conlon who considered it a privilege to serve a priest.

The oven door was open a crack. Inside I found a sheaf of takeout menus: pizza, grinders, Chinese
.
The oven was electric, so presumably this was not a fire hazard. Still: the
oven
? For a moment I forgot that my brother was gone, that there was no longer anyone left to scold.

“Art!” I said out loud. “For God's sake.”

At that moment I heard a sharp knock, a male voice calling my name.

For an instant I froze. Silly girl, I thought, and went to the door.

My brother Mike stood in the hallway, dressed for work. At the funeral we had barely spoken; he was occupied with his boys, and I with my grief.

I opened the door a crack. “What do you want?”

I'd noticed at the funeral that he'd lost weight. For the first time Mike seemed to be shrinking rather than expanding. His chinos hung on him. His hairline was receding. He looked diminished and tired, a middle-aged man.

“Ma said you'd be here.” He looked over my shoulder into the apartment, the floor littered with the empty boxes I'd brought. “You should have told me. I could have helped.”

“I didn't think you'd want to.”

“Okay. I deserve that.” Mike took the box from my hands. “Show me where to start.”

We packed in silence, the books Art had collected over many years, in Boston and in Rome. “The last time I saw him—” Mike began.

“Stop. I don't want to hear it.”

“Sheila, please.” He looked stricken. “You were there. At Mom's.”

I thought of Mike stomping up the Pawlowskis' porch stairs, hurling invective. Mike ready to tear our brother in two.

“For the rest of my life I've got to live with that,” he said. “Art died thinking I hated him. That his own brother believed he was a pedophile.”

He wanted comfort, and I wouldn't give it. I had no sympathy for him.

“Well, he was right,” I said. “You do.”

“Not anymore.”

I stared at him.

“I—saw her. The kid's mother.” How to convey the look that passed over his face? Even now it is difficult to describe.

“What do you mean, you saw her?”

“Nobody knows this,” he said. “Nobody can. Abby would kill me. I'd lose everything.”

And then he told me what I've just told you.

“She's a liar,” Mike finished. “She made the whole thing up. The hell she put that kid through, and for what? A little money.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

I didn't tell him Art's secret, not then. One day soon he will read these pages, and he will understand.

I
PARKED
the truck on Teare Street and unloaded the boxes. Art's books would be stored at my parents' house. His furniture had gone back to the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

Ma helped me carry the boxes into the parlor. I stopped a moment at the Altar and touched my parents' wedding picture in its dark wooden frame.

“Who married you and Dad?” I asked.

Ma looked startled by the question. “Father Cronin. Do you remember him?” She set a box of books on the floor. “He was at St. Dymphna's for years. He passed away when you were small.”

“Not your uncle Fergus?” I turned to her. “Ma, why not?”

“Your father never liked him,” she said.

I stared at her until she turned away, to straighten by a millimeter the photograph I'd disturbed.

“You'd have to ask him. I never understood it, myself. Fergus was good to me and Arthur. He looked after us all those years.”

Did you know, Ma? For God's sake, did you wonder?
If I were a different person, I might have asked her. But I am her daughter, and the words wouldn't come.

Ma laid a hand on one of the boxes. “Someday I'll go through Arthur's things. Not just yet, though.”

Again our eyes met.

“Don't wait too long,” I said.