Faith by Jennifer Haigh Page B

Mike rolled to a stop and lowered his window.
    â€œHey, man. Happy Easter.” They shook hands and Mike glanced quickly over Tim’s shoulder, trying not to be obvious about it. It’s a look I have witnessed many times, a charged sort of alertness. I can imagine Mike shuffling past the Morrisons’ fifty years hence, drawn to that house by some ancient instinct, like an old dog with a vague memory of pleasure.
    â€œLooks like a full house,” he said. “Everybody make it this year?”
    â€œAll but one,” said Tim. “She’s at her in-laws’.”
    â€œToo bad. When you see her, tell her I said hi.”
    â€œI will,” said Tim, though they both knew he wouldn’t. “Hey, how’s your ma?”
    â€œSame 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.
    â€œArthur 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,