A shadow passed over Fran’s face.
“We aren’t speaking much these days, Father. I’m afraid she’s up to her old ways.”
“Why do you say that?” Art said—careful, careful.
“That Kevin Vick is hanging around again. She denies it, but I have an inside source.”
“Aidan?” Art said, feeling his heart.
“He tells his granny everything.” Fran hesitated. “This is what it’s come to, pumping a child for information. But how else am I supposed to know what’s going on over there? If Kath is using, she’ll lie about the color of the sky.”
Is he all right? Art wanted to say but didn’t. Does he like his new school? Does he ask about me?
In the last seven months he’d seen the boy only from a distance. Just before Christmas he’d left a gift on Kathleen’s porch, a toboggan tied with a red ribbon. He’d waited nearly an hour that time, his car parked across the street, for Aidan to come home from school.
LATER, AFTER dropping Fran at her neat duplex, Art pondered what he’d learned. Kevin Vick was a recurring presence in Kathleen’s life, a local hood who disappeared periodically for unsavory reasons: thirty days in a court-ordered rehab, brief jail terms for possession and driving under the influence. Art had met the guy only once, when Vick stopped by unannounced at Kath’s apartment, something he was clearly accustomed to doing. Art and Kath were drinking coffee in the kitchen when Vick’s battered Camaro squealed up to the curb. As was typical of the wayward young, he was dumbstruck in the presence of a priest. I just need to get some stuff, he’d mumbled, heading straight for Kath’s bedroom. Kath was palpably embarrassed, while Aidan—who normally hovered like a hummingbird during Art’s visits—seemed to be in hiding. Was he afraid of Kevin Vick? Fran had long maintained that the man was dangerous. Art suspected that the truth was subtler and more pernicious: that under his influence, Kath herself became dangerous.
At this thought, he made an illegal U-turn—in the local dialect, banged a Uey—on Atlantic Avenue and headed west to Dunster. A century ago it had been a village in its own right, with shops and a Congregational church and a pretty town green, until it was garroted by a state highway and absorbed into the noisy, traffic-strangled Boston suburbs. Kath Conlon lived on North Fenno, a side street at the far end of town, in a three-decker Flip Finn had bought as an investment. Art had convinced him to take her on as a tenant, despite her lack of references or a steady paycheck. I’ll vouch for her, he’d promised, sounding more confident than he felt. If she’s ever late with the rent, you can come to me.
North Fenno was short and narrow, the houses set close to the curb. Aidan and Kath lived on the first floor, in a shotgun apartment with a kitchen at the rear. Art drove past slowly, noting lights in the windows, Aidan’s yellow toboggan still lying on the front porch, though the snow had melted a month ago.
Kevin Vick’s beat-up red Camaro was parked at the curb.
Well, now what? Art thought. At one time he would have knocked at the door, but those days were gone forever.
(And if he had gone to her door that night—would this have changed anything? It seems unlikely. The match had been struck, the fuse already lit.)
In the end he turned the car around and headed for the rectory. He would do as Fran had asked: he would remember Kath and Aidan in his prayers.
BACK AT the rectory, beside the old rotary phone, he found a stack of messages. It was the usual mix of parish business. Sister Ursula, the school principal, had set a rehearsal date for the eighth-grade commencement. A young bride had called to schedule her wedding. (In all his years as a parish priest, Art had never received a phone call from a groom.) Only two of the messages could be called personal: one from his old friend Clem Fleury in Rome, another from Sheila, me, in Philadelphia. They were recorded faithfully in Fran’s neat handwriting, indistinguishable from my own or my mother’s or my aunt Clare’s—evidence of our shared education, twelve years in the parochial schools. (My brother Mike, taught by the same nuns, writes illegible chicken scratch, as do my father and his brother and all their male children. I think back to those school papers corrected in red ink—Penmanship!—marked down half a grade if an i was left undotted, a t uncrossed. Maybe only the girls were penalized in this way.)
Messages in hand, Art retreated upstairs. With Father Aloysius gone, he had the run of the place; but from long habit—he had lived his whole life in shared housing—he avoided the common areas, the dark parlor and stiff sitting room. I would see these rooms a week later, when I came to help Art pack his few possessions before the Archdiocese changed the locks. Undoubtedly the circumstances influenced my perception; still, I pitied the engaged couples reporting for their mandatory Pre-Cana counseling, squirming for hours in those punishingly uncomfortable chairs. Art felt at ease only in the cluttered front room, which served as the parish office, and in Fran Conlon’s kitchen, with its lingering smell of breakfast. He spent the rest of his time in his bedroom, which he’d outfitted with a stereo and portable TV. Also a cordless telephone, from which he returned my call.
He left a message I now know by heart. I have replayed it several times, analyzing the tone of his voice. Sheila, it’s me, Brother Father. The man in black. I’ve escaped from a hostage situation, three hours with the parish council. I’m slammed tomorrow, so I’ll try you on Friday. If he had any inkling of what was about to happen, he gave no indication. There was no hint of distress in his voice.
I HAVE reconstructed his movements the next day, Holy Thursday. I have in my possession Art’s desk planner, its black leather cover embossed with the numerals 2002. From long practice I decipher his cramped handwriting (he too, it seems, was given a pass on penmanship). At 9 A.M. he attended a fellowship breakfast at St. Thomas Presbyterian, sponsored by the local Ecumenical Council. In the afternoon he heard confessions and gave the sacrament at Mountain View nursing home. On the same page, I found a yellow Post-it note: Drop by choir rehearsal. He had doubts about the new director and feared a disaster on Sunday morning, her first Easter at Sacred Heart. Thursday evening he celebrated the annual Mass of the Lord’s Supper, a ninety-minute extravaganza complete with full choir, trumpets from the eighth-grade orchestra and the ritual foot-washing, Art kneeling at the altar before twelve barefoot parishioners, like Christ bathing the feet of the Apostles. Afterward the Eucharist would be carried, in solemn procession, to the Repository. With luck he’d eat supper by midnight. Fran would be long gone, and he’d have no chance to question her about Kevin Vick. He would sit in the kitchen with the Atlantic Monthly, eating whatever she’d left in the refrigerator, then rush through his prayers and fall exhausted into bed.
Which brings us to Friday morning, the Friday in question. Good Friday, if you are raised Catholic, is something of a trial—an endless day to be loathed and dreaded, if you are the Catholic child of Mary McGann. Each year Mike and I suffered it together: a day of no school, no television, no loud playing; a day of rosaries and soggy fried fish. My mother took a certain pleasure in disparaging our flimsy modern devotions—put to shame, she claimed, by the extreme rites of her girlhood, Good Friday as it was meant to be observed, at her childhood parish in Roxbury. From noon to 3 P.M., the hours Our Lord spent hanging on the cross, young Mary Devine had knelt in prayer, with nothing but a piece of toast in her stomach. (Having strictly observed the Friday fast, one full meal per day, and that without meat.)
Off to church now, she’d conclude sourly. What’s left of it. At this Mike would stare at me with mournful pious eyes and we would both fall out laughing, and Ma would bemoan the fate of our souls.
Though it was rough going for the faithful, a priest’s Good Friday duties were light. Mass could not be celebrated, which was itself a rare freedom. Years ago, when Art was a lowly cleric at Holy Redeemer, Frank Lynch had declared Holy Thursday an all-night poker game. Priests from the surrounding parishes drank until dawn and slept until noon, the one day of the year they were excused from morning Mass.
In Art’s datebook, that morning is blank. At 2 P.M. he would lead the Solemn Commemoration of the Lord’s Passion. In the evening he was