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.
Chapter 3
The story begins on a bright afternoon many years ago, one I remember as though I’d seen it. (This is natural enough in a family like ours, with its canon of approved stories. They are told in the manner of repertory theater: hang around long enough and you’ll hear them all.) Imagine the trees tinged with red, a sky so clear it seems contrived, the high blue heaven of tourist brochures. It is the first resplendent day of a New England fall, and Ma’s new husband is driving from Grantham to Brighton, his hand on her thigh. They are dressed for a wedding or a funeral: she in Sunday hat and gloves, he grudgingly coaxed into a suit. In the backseat is a battered footlocker from his Navy days, packed with the few possessions a junior seminarian is allowed. Squeezed in beside it is Art, fourteen years old, staring out at a scene that will shape the rest of his life: the headquarters of the Boston Archdiocese and its famous seminary, St. John’s.
The decision to come here had been his alone. From the age of ten he’d served as an altar boy. Two mornings a week he’d met Father Cronin in the vestry at St. Dymphna’s, helped him into his chasuble and alb. At the altar Art genuflected, lit candles, carried cruets. At Consecration he rang the bells. The sound never failed to send him soaring, a feeling that was nearly indescribable: a sweet exhilaration, a spreading warmth. In those moments he’d sensed a transformation occurring, before him and inside him. Bread and wine into the Body and Blood. An ordinary boy into something else.
In the confessional Father Cronin posed the question. Have you ever considered it? They discussed at some length what a vocation felt like, how you could ever be sure. Certainty will come later, the priest promised. And one Sunday after Mass, he invited Ma to the rectory for a chat.
Now, washed and waxed for the occasion, Dad’s car passed through the stone gates. A few others were already parked behind the dormitory, a cavernous brick building perched atop a hill. Ted hefted the trunk to his shoulder and with much grumbling hauled it up three flights of stairs, down a long corridor to the cell Art would share with a boy named Ray Cousins. (I do not invent this: in those days at least, seminarians, like prisoners, slept in cells.)
Like all others on the third floor, Art’s cell was small and square. In it were two narrow beds, two wooden desks. The floors were bare; metal blinds hung at the one window. There were no rugs—a fact my mother emphasizes in the telling—and no curtains. No trace, anywhere, of anything soft.
Dad set down the trunk. Ma was uncharacteristically silent, her eyes welling. It was the moment Art had dreaded for months.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, embracing her. “I’ll write you.” Briefly he shook Ted’s hand.
I SHOULD say a few words about that campus, which figures so prominently in the life and ministry of my brother. How those buildings came to be is a story in itself. For the nearly forty years that William Cardinal O’Connell ran the Archdiocese, Boston was the capital of Catholic America, and in his eyes it deserved a facciata as grand as the Vatican. “Little Rome,” the local papers called it, the hills of Brighton dotted with monuments: the seminary’s neoclassic library and exquisite chapel, the elegant palazzo where the Cardinal slept and the ostentatious mausoleum where he sleeps now. At the entrance of each building was carved the Cardinal’s own motto, Vigor in Arduis.
Strength Amid Difficulties.
It was, in every way, the house O’Connell had built.
Art was barely a teenager when he arrived there, and for twelve years it was—not his home, exactly, but as close to one as an aspiring priest was allowed. Later I would visit him there. Together we walked its landscaped hills, its winding footpaths. Art showed me a shady grove of cedars that hid a secret: a round swimming pool, long drained, its cement cracked. The pool was twelve feet across and five feet deep. Cardinal O’Connell had ordered it dug for the summertime refreshment of his dogs, two black poodles that, like the seminarians in their black cassocks, suffered from the heat.
IN MINOR seminary, order was paramount. The boys lived according to an ancient template, a sixth-century invention. Benedict was not yet a saint when he fashioned it. Forever after, it was known as the Rule.
The Rule governed the boys’ movements. The seminary day was punctuated by bells. There were bells for sleeping and waking and morning Mass, for meals and study and sports. Six classes a day, each an hour. Each opened and closed with a prayer.
At first bell the boys rose and dressed. An upperclassman handpicked by the rector made his way down each corridor, singing out the morning greeting: Benedicamus Domino.
The boys sang in answer: Deo Gratias.
The day’s first class was Latin. The teacher, Father Fleury, had studied in Rome. He was young and fair-haired and wished himself elsewhere—among the ruins at Ostia Antica; kneeling before the Sacrament at Santa Maria Maggiore; walking along the Tiber, breviary in hand. In a few short years the Latin Mass would be abandoned, but at St. John’s at least, the fact would go unacknowledged. The curriculum would not change. Why learn Latin if the Mass was said in English? If the boys wondered, they gave no sign. They declined and conjugated and asked no questions. Father Fleury corrected them rigorously.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
A bell rang.
The boys processed to algebra, then history. The noon bell called them to chapel. In silence they walked to the refectory for lunch. A hot meal always, meat bathed in slick gravy—unappetizing fare, and yet they’d have killed for more of it; the invisible cooks, by ignorance or design, misjudged the hunger of growing boys. The priests sat up front at a long table, the rector at the center. At his elbow was a brass bell. If he rang the bell after the blessing, talking was forbidden. A seminarian would read aloud from scripture. A hundred boys chewed and swallowed.
A bell rang.
English came next; then biology. A bell rang for afternoon rec. The gymnasium had tall mullioned windows, as the dead Cardinal had ordered; they’d been covered in chicken wire to protect the fine glass. The boys suited up for basketball, a game Art had once avoided. (In Grantham it was a sport for tough boys. A Morrison or a Pawlowski might take out your eye.) But like everything at seminary, sport was mandatory; and Art was no longer the smallest or the shyest. Day after day the boys raced across the court, a crest painted at its center: Seminarium Sancti Joannis Bostoniense 1884.
A bell rang.
The boys showered and dressed, for dinner, Rosary, Spiritual Reading. At eight o’clock came the Grand Silence. Until breakfast the next morning, talking was forbidden. Not a word would be spoken in the corridors.
The routine was fixed; it deviated for no one. Like those before him—more majorum—Art lived by the Rule.
HE TOOK to this new life with great enthusiasm, a sunflower turning its face to the sky. He loved the orderly days, the mornings in chapel. The silence nourished him; his soul expanded to fill it. Every moment of the day became a prayer. The buildings themselves thrilled him, their high vaulted ceilings—to draw the eye upward, said Father Dowd; the mind closer to God.
Father Dowd taught the boys music. He was the youngest of the faculty, a brand-new priest, only eight years