Read Online Faith by Jennifer Haigh - Free Book Online Page B

Passion Play.
    As it turned out, he did none of these things. His calendar makes no mention of what actually happened, the 10 A.M. phone call from Bishop John Gilman, an aide to the Cardinal.
    At ten-fifteen Art got in his car and drove to Lake Street.

Chapter 5
    I t takes nearly an hour to drive from Grantham to Brighton, where the Boston Archdiocese was then headquartered. Art traveled west on Commonwealth Avenue, the road climbing and dipping through the suburbs of Brookline and Allston. What was he thinking as he drove? He told me later that he’d had no idea why he’d been summoned, which seems incredible. For months the entire city had been reading about the scandal, priests from all over the Archdiocese accused, reprimanded, exposed.
    â€œOkay, I had an idea,” he admitted when I pressed him. “But my idea was completely wrong.”
    To make sense of this, I’ve had to think about what it was like to be a priest in Boston that spring, when anyone in a collar was suspect. “Maybe we were paranoid,” Father Fleury told me later, “but it seemed that the whole world suddenly looked at us sideways.” One after another reputations were destroyed, careers ended, lives ruined. Among the first to fall was the Street Priest who’d walked the Combat Zone: at his apartment on Beacon Street, he’d apparently offered more than a weekly Mass. Amazingly, no one suspected it at the time. No one gave a thought to those lost children sitting cross-legged on his floor, the Street Priest looking down on them from a great height as they received the Eucharist from his hands.
    To Art, one allegation was even more shocking. Ray Cousins, his old cellmate, had been accused of molesting a boy. Ray was a gentle soul—“the last guy you’d ever suspect”—but the Archdiocese was making an example of him. The Cardinal had been widely vilified for covering up such allegations, so now he made a great show—just for appearances, Art insisted, pro forma tantum —of taking every accusation seriously. Anyone who’d ever known Ray was being interrogated. Naturally Art’s name would be on the list.
    So as my brother drove the final hill into Brighton, it was Ray Cousins he considered: could it possibly be true?
    At the bottom of the hill he slammed on the brakes. Comm Ave. was clogged with traffic, vans and trucks parked on both sides of the road, some with engines idling, satellite dishes attached to their roofs. Well, of course: nearly every night the local news featured a dispatch from Lake Street, the Cardinal’s response—or usually, his silence—at each new allegation of abuse. For these segments the Chancery was always the backdrop, a reporter standing before the building as though at any minute His Eminence might emerge.
    Art drove past the news vans and took the long way around, through the back entrance. He parked behind the Chancery, where Church business was conducted. After the death of the great O’Connell, his successor—my mother’s hero, Cardinal Cushing—had made this addition to the campus. The Chancery is a square brick bunker, of a utilitarian ugliness so incongruous that it seems intentional, as though Cushing—a local boy, a famous populist—had been making a point.
    As promised, Art’s official escort was waiting at the rear door. Gary Moriconi stood with his back to the building—coatless, smoking, his cassock flapping in the wind. “Of all people,” Art fumed to me later. I have since met Father Gary, a short, stocky man with a barrel chest and a memorable voice, nasal and high-pitched, that doesn’t match his body. He was Art’s age, fifty-one, yet his dark hair was suspiciously free of gray.
    The two greeted each other with a wariness that went back many years. At seminary they’d been classmates, but not friends. Art saw at a glance that Gary knew exactly why he’d been