Faith

There are storms. It’s impossible to describe Grantham without mentioning the wind. It is, I’m told, the windiest town in Massachusetts, no small distinction if you’ve witnessed Provincetown or Gloucester or Marblehead in a gale. I heard this from an insurance agent who, after the blizzard of ’78, spent half the eighties processing claims for Grantham homeowners. In most months the wind is omnipresent, a constant ruffling, scratching, snuffling, as though a large pet, a zoo animal perhaps, were sleeping at the back door.

My parents’ house is three blocks from the seawall, so by local standards they live inland. Like many places in town, theirs started out a Cape. The prior owner had added a second floor, two snug bedrooms that would soon belong to me and Mike. When I go back to visit, which isn’t often, I am struck by the closeness of the place. Our living arrangements were so intimate that no cough or sneeze or bowel movement could go unnoticed. I fell asleep each night to the sound of my father’s snoring, a low rumbling beneath the floorboards. Dad was the rhythm section, riffing along with the soprano gulls, the bass violin of Grantham Light, the percussive brush of the wild, wild wind.

In the eyes of the neighborhood we were a small family, made exotic by my mother’s past. She had been married before, a brief teenage union that her uncle, also a priest, had used his influence to have annulled, though it had already produced a son. Her husband had disappeared into a bright Friday afternoon when Art was just a baby, for reasons that remain mysterious. According to Aunt Clare Boyle—not really my aunt, but a childhood friend of my mother’s—he’d borrowed money from a South Boston shark only a fool would cross. It remains to this day a breaking story: fifty years on, the details are still subject to change. Clare, lonely in her old age, uses the information to attract visitors, serves it up a scrap at a time alongside the shortbread and milky tea.

The marriage itself was no secret—Art kept his father’s surname, Breen—but it was a topic we didn’t discuss. According to a raft of yellowed papers I found in Ma’s attic, the Commonwealth granted her a divorce on grounds of abandonment, a fact never mentioned. She preferred the Church’s explanation: the marriage had simply never occurred.

And so my father, Ted McGann, became Art’s stepfather. At the time nobody used the idiotic term blended family. Maybe such households exist, but in our case, the label did not apply. We were two distinct families, unblended, the one simply grafted on to the other. I felt, always, that Art belonged to Ma and to his lost father, Mike to my own father and what I think of as Dad’s tribe, who are noisy and numerous and in their own way impressive. Like them Mike is blond, square in the shoulders and jaw. He has the McGann restlessness, stubbornness, and stamina. It says something about him, and the way he lives his life, that he has never solved a problem by mere reflection. This goes a long way toward explaining his role in Art’s story. He so resembles Dad that he seems to have no other parent. His DNA is pure McGann.

I have always been fascinated by heredity, the traits passed on from mother and father, the two sets of genes whirred together in a blender. Art and I favor our mother. From the time I was thirteen or fourteen, people have noticed the resemblance: Ah, Mary, she’s the picture of you at that age. Always Ma dismissed the idea—quickly, prophylactically, as if afraid of where the conversation might lead. Once she turned to study me intently, as a stranger might. Really? she asked, as though she were seriously considering the possibility. And then: I don’t see it, myself.

Yet a few facts even Ma can’t deny, such as our common height, our dark hair and pale freckled skin, our eyes that are sometimes green, sometimes brown. Ma and I have long faces, thin lips, sharp noses. These are features a woman must grow into: homely in childhood, plain in adolescence, attractive in middle age. Well into her sixties, my mother was finally quite striking, though the overall effect was not beauty, but a fierce kind of astuteness. Art’s more generous features, his dimples and full mouth, must have come from his father. Because I have no way to verify this, not even a wedding picture, I am free to fill in the details as I like; and I like to think that there was something sweet and expansive in that man, Ma’s first love.

As a child I felt caught between these two families: on the one hand Ma and Art, who looked like my relations; on the other Dad and Mike. I switched allegiances as it suited me, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

The wind, of course, being Dad.

My father’s drinking, and his anger. Each fueled the other, though in which direction? Did he drink because he was angry, and or did he get angry when he drank?

Art was twelve when my parents married, and I can imagine how that affected him. My father, as I’ve suggested, is not an easy man, and here was a boy used to having his mother to himself. Ted McGann was twenty-four when he met Ma, just out of the Navy and, by 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 disgrace—she attended a celebration of his silver jubilee. She beamed with pride through the anniversary Mass. Yet 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.

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