Faith (9 page)

“Same as ever. You know Ma,” Mike said, slightly puzzled. Usually it was Dad people asked after. Ted McGann had been charming and convivial in his day, popular in the neighborhood.
Your dad's a character
, we were told throughout our childhoods. About our mother nobody said a word.

Mike gave him a wave and drove on, feeling foolish.
Everybody make it this year?
He'd never had any self-control where Lisa Morrison was concerned. And now she was married to someone else, spending Easter with her own husband and kids. Better that he hadn't seen her, he decided. Better to remember the way she used to be.

He parked halfway down the block. Compared to the Morrisons', our parents' house was still as a tomb. A blue light glowed in their bedroom window. Dad spent whole days, now, staring at the TV screen.

Mike climbed the porch steps. When Ma came to the door he saw anguish in her face.

How exactly had she phrased it? “They're going after Arthur.” And then: “I was at the church this morning. They're saying terrible things about him. That he did something wrong.” Euphemisms for euphemisms, as though the usual terms—
molested, abused—
weren't vague enough.

And doesn't it say something about that particular moment, that spring in Boston, that Mike understood immediately what she meant? Sure, he read the paper. One priest, at St. Paul's in Hingham, had molested more than a hundred boys. In Mike's class at BC High, there'd been several boys from St. Paul's. Poring over the
Globe,
he had recalled their faces: Tom Downey, Michael Behan. He wondered—you had to—if they had been abused.

In the kitchen Ma put on the kettle. Grudgingly she gave up the details, as though she herself had been accused of a crime. There was a boy in the parish, eight years old; a boy without a father. Arthur had been kind to him, taken him on outings. “The mother is telling filthy stories,” Ma said, her mouth tight. “She should be ashamed.”

Her mortification was palpable, her voice quavering, her color high. She blamed the newspapers, who'd brought up the ugly mess in the first place; the Cardinal, so cowed by the bad press that he'd turned on his own priests.

“Arthur gave his life to the Church,” said Ma, “and what does he get in return?”

She wasn't looking for an answer, and Mike didn't offer one. He understood that she wanted an audience—loud agreement, righteous outrage. In Ma's eyes, Art was the victim. The Conlon boy she dismissed with a wave of her hand. “There's something wrong with him. Only a disturbed child would invent a story like that.”

Mike was shocked by her callousness; shocked but not surprised. He had known it his whole life, and here was the proof: charged with the most despicable crime imaginable, Art was still a saint in her eyes. Her son the priest could do no wrong.

He got out of there as fast as he could. He wanted only to be alone in his truck, the stereo blasting. His mind could scarcely take it in. An eight-year-old boy: a year older than Ryan. Mike thought of his own son, boisterous, sweet-tempered, cheerfully nonverbal. Not if his life depended on it could Ryan invent such a lie.

And for a moment that was all Mike needed. He had never been an analytical thinker. As a cop, sailor, salesman, he had relied on instinct. And he knew kids: disturbed or not, no eight-year-old boy would
pretend
to be abused.

His own brother.

Half brother
, Mike thought. It was a term never used in our family, but in that moment it comforted Mike to think that whatever was wrong with Art, whatever diseased genes the guy carried, had come from Harry Breen. He'd always nursed a certain contempt for Art's father, a feeble loser who'd abandoned his wife and kid. Now he was grateful to the man for one thing: at least he'd given Art his name. In a day or two, when the story hit the papers, Mike's name, his kids' name, would not be tarnished. Art's parish was three towns over. Mike's friends and neighbors, the kids in Ryan's school, would never connect them to Father Breen.

Though in Grantham there would be no hiding it. Mike thought of Tim Morrison, for the first time in his life showing interest in Ma. Of course: Tim—and the whole Morrison clan—already knew.

He drove around for hours that night, knowing what was waiting for him at home. He knew exactly what Abby would make of this. That on some level she'd been waiting for—not
this
, not exactly, but something like it. To prove finally and forever that she'd been right all along.

He found her in the kitchen, packing Ryan's lunchbox. “No Easter baskets?” she asked.

“Shit. I forgot.”

She gave him what he thought of as her Mom look:
Language!
“Um,
okay
,” she said. “But wasn't that the whole reason you went over there?”

For a moment Mike hesitated.
It's Easter
, he thought.
I'll tell her tomorrow
.

Another day wasn't going to change a thing.

H
E WOULD
see this later as a turning point, the moment when he stopped recognizing himself, the person he had always been. As I have said, deception is not in Mike's nature. He had no secrets from Abby, had never wanted any. He was simply unable to repeat what Ma had said.

Alone in his basement, he found himself reviewing his recent interactions with our brother. There weren't many, he realized. He saw Art mainly on holidays—a little apart, always, in his black garb; a little lost in the noisy throng of McGanns and Devines. Lately Mike had missed quite a few of these gatherings, which Abby attended only grudgingly. After an hour Mike felt her eyes on him. After two hours she began looking at her watch.

When had he last seen Art with no distractions: no bored, resentful wife, no kids tugging at his sleeve? He thought of a time years before, in the months leading up to his wedding, which Ma had initially refused to attend. Her objections were predictable, yet difficult to answer. Only Art had been able to appease her. He seemed not to mind that Abby had been raised Lutheran. For this Mike was grateful, if a little surprised.

Abby, Jesus. When she caught wind of this, he could say goodbye to peace.

Religion had always been the fault line between them, the crack in the seal. In the beginning she'd been amused by what she called Catholic superstitions—the Last Supper hanging in his mother's kitchen, the St. Christopher medal he wore around his neck. The medal was a confirmation gift from his godmother, Clare Boyle. It had sat in a drawer for years, until Mike was deployed to the Gulf in '91 and figured he needed all the help he could get.

As a kid, a young man, he'd considered religion irrelevant, a dull hobby like birdwatching or stamp collecting, the peculiar obsession of pious women like his mother. Yet he'd seen things, as a cop and in the Navy, that changed his thinking: the everyday cruelties and lewdness, aggression and vulgarity; the ODs and car crashes and barroom brawls. Human nature was volatile, perverse and treacherous. Religion was necessary the way marriage was necessary. People—male people in particular—were animals, dull-witted and violent. Left to themselves, they would fuck and fight and rip each other apart.

And so, every day since basic training, he had worn the medal.
Your lucky charm
, Abby called it, with unattractive sarcasm. Praying to saints she considered ridiculous.
How can they hear you? It's not like they're gods.
That first Christmas, wearing her engagement ring, she had joined his family at midnight Mass, but had refused to kneel for the Consecration. Mike was stunned. In all the time he'd known her, she'd never set foot in a church of any kind. Now, suddenly, her Protestantism was a matter of such deep conviction that she had to announce it to the whole congregation.

Back then Mike had made concessions, which he'd since come to view as mistakes. To please her parents they married at the Nelsons' church in Naperville, Illinois, a cold, empty building with a bare altar, the walls painted beige. Art had officiated alongside the minister—
concelebrant
s, Mike explained to Ma, the word Art had used. Our parents drove out to Naperville the day before the wedding, sixteen hours in their little Escort. When they arrived, Mike was baffled to see Ma behind the wheel. “I thought I'd pitch in with the driving,” she said. Later he realized that she'd driven the whole way, our mother who'd always been the passenger. It should have alarmed him; but at the time he'd scarcely noticed, absorbed in the commotion of his wedding day.

Now he'd been married eight years—happily, he thought, but how did you measure? He'd never been married to anyone else. And of course, it was useless to compare himself and Abby to his parents. By that standard, every marriage in America would look like bliss.

And yet some things
could
be measured. They lived in a good neighborhood, on a wide tree-lined street. Their house, a solid Colonial, was twice the size of his parents' cramped Cape. In a slow year he earned more than his father had in five, enough that Abby could stay at home with the boys. And compared to his previous jobs—security guard, sailor, beat cop—selling real estate was safe and cozy. No one was going to blow your head off for trying to sell them a house. Mike enjoyed the work: meeting new people, sharing an important milestone in their lives. He thought often of his former clients, raising their kids in the houses he'd sold them. It pleased him to know that, in some small way, he'd had a hand in their destinies. And really, in the life of a family—he knew this firsthand—the choice of a house was not so small. It meant something that his boys had large airy rooms, a grassy yard to play in; that he and Abby had the third floor to themselves, space and privacy to do what couples often stopped doing when the kids came. They agreed on the important things—sex, money, how to raise the boys. There was rarely anything to fight about, except religion and his family. In Mike's case, the two came intertwined. They were nearly the same thing.

At first he had chalked it up to simple difference. Before Abby, he'd dated local girls who shared his temper, his humor, his tastes and dislikes. All had been fond of our parents—of Dad, anyway, who sober could charm the birds out of the trees. Nobody had been fond of Ma—that would be asking too much—but Mike's girlfriends had accepted her. Lisa Morrison had even managed to make her laugh. In this way, as in all others, Abby was nothing like Lisa. At the beginning, and for a long time afterward, that had been part of her appeal.

M
OST MARRIAGES
result from happy accidents. My brother and Abby are such a couple. I have heard Mike say (though not recently) that they met at exactly the right time. A year sooner he wouldn't have noticed her, so crazed and raw over Lisa Morrison that all other women seemed vague to him, slightly out of focus. Abby, of course, wouldn't have seen him at all. She wouldn't go near the places Mike favored, dark holes in Southie and Dorchester, by night loud with bar bands, by day filled with cops and firemen watching sports. But in the winter of 1993 Mike abandoned his locals. He'd resolved to make changes in his life—“a course correction,” he told me by phone. For months he'd battled what he later understood was depression. Lisa Morrison had ditched him for the last time, and Mike had chased, and lost interest in, a string of girls—barflies mostly, good for a few weekends, nothing more. He grew tired of drinking, tired of chasing. Tired, to his astonishment, of being a cop. Desert Storm had messed with his head, left him dissatisfied and restless. Police work seemed increasingly pointless. There was no one he hated enough to harass, no one he valued enough to protect. The guys he worked with—the best part of the job, he'd always felt—began to grate on him. Their noisy camaraderie made him lonely. Our cousin Rich had gotten rich in real estate, and convinced Mike to study for a license. And a few months later, at his first closing, he met Abby.

Abigail Nelson, the seller's attorney: when they spoke by phone, Mike pictured a stout matron in bifocals and sensible shoes. At the closing he was startled to find her tall and shapely, dark hair in a ponytail like a high school cheerleader. He knew roughly how a closing worked, but was grateful at the way Abby took charge, passing around documents, collecting signatures with great dispatch. After the handshakes, the
thank yous
and
good lucks
, he found himself walking beside her, shoulder to shoulder, out into the cold. In high heels she was nearly his height, with marvelously long legs and feet to match. Once, laughing, he called them flippers, and learned that Abby was a girl who couldn't be teased. Later, meeting her family, he understood why. The Nelsons were serious people, Abby's father especially, a pediatrician who, to Mike's eye, had little feeling for kids. The details of Abby's childhood—the music lessons and summer camps, family vacations at the lake house in Door County—seemed to come from movies or television. Mike didn't know people who lived that way. It seemed in every way an improvement on our own family, who had never, in his memory, taken a trip together. We were latchkey kids before the word existed—like the Morrisons, the Pawlowskis, the Mullinses and Greers. Nobody considered this a problem (though we once set a small kitchen fire while heating a frozen pizza). It had never occurred to him that there was another way.

They'd been dating just a few months when Abby took a pregnancy test. A false alarm, it turned out, but for Mike the world had turned. However briefly, he had imagined himself a father, and Abby—unlike Lisa Morrison, or anyone else he'd dated—a mother. He'd tried on a life that fit him perfectly, comfortable right out of the box.

Their engagement stunned her parents, who'd already settled on one son-in-law—Abby's ex-fiancé, for whose medical residency she had moved to Boston two years before. The Nelsons had expected a doctor. Instead they got a loudmouthed ex-cop with, apparently, a harsh Boston accent, a thing Mike never knew he possessed. Worse still, their new son-in-law was Catholic.
(Very Catholic
, according to Abby's mother.) Mass on Sunday, fish on Friday. Catholic enough that his brother was a priest.