Leah didn’t know Patrick personally, but she’d heard the walk-on-water stories about him. “If this story’s going to get worse, Al’s going to need to be medicated.”
“He’s going to keep trying to insinuate himself into this story,” I said. “I need you to keep him away from me.”
“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “Now write me an obituary worthy of the man.”
I returned to my desk and closed my eyes for a moment, conjuring Patrick’s everyman face and deep, powerful voice. His regular-guyness made him the perfect clergyman for Riverside, the on-its-way-back mill town where I’d moved right out of college. In recent decades, neighboring Portland has reinvented itself from a rundown seaport to a hip little city known for its fine restaurants, brick sidewalks and culture with a capital C. Riverside is trying to emulate that success while hanging on to its working-class soul.
While Patrick’s outspoken leadership brought him fame throughout Southern Maine, heavily Catholic Riverside was his home. His unpretentious nature made him popular among the second—and third-generation progeny of the immigrants who wove textiles on the banks of the Cascabago River. I knew his death—especially coming in the midst of the school bombings—would shake the close-knit community to its core.
RIVERSIDE—Rev. Patrick Seamus Doherty, who made headlines when he publicly criticized the Catholic hierarchy’s response to the scandal involving abuse of children by some of its priests, died Tuesday morning at St. Jerome’s Parish rectory in Riverside. He was 58. The cause of his death is undetermined.
Father Doherty—who insisted parishioners call him by his first name—was well known in Southern Maine before he broke with Bishop Raymond Guilfoyle over what he called the diocese’s “reprehensible, irresponsible, shameful” handling of allegations that priests associated with the diocese had sexually abused children in the course of their pastoral work. Prior to that proclamation, which Father Doherty made in a letter published in this newspaper and others, he had been serving as spokesman for the Church in regard to the scandal.
“I cannot in good conscience continue to speak for the church about the criminal allegations being lodged against a number of priests who have served this diocese during the past four decades,” he said. “Jesus would tell the truth. My Church should be following His example, rather than allowing lawyers to dictate the sparse words of comfort they may offer to the families devastated by actual abuse and the institutional church’s denial of its culpability.”
Father Doherty’s high profile and the public nature of his stance on the abuse scandal appeared to have insulated him from any internal discipline. He remained at St. Jerome’s, where he was one of two priests serving the town’s largest parish.
Two years ago, Father Doherty was tapped by Bishop Guilfoyle to manage the consolidation of Catholic parishes in Southern Maine. In the past five years, twelve churches have been shuttered, a result of falling attendance and financial pressure growing out of the abuse crisis. Last June’s announcement that St. Jerome’s would be closed set off a firestorm of protests. Nightly gatherings were held in the West Street churchyard all summer. In recent weeks, prayer vigils have given way to loud chants demanding abandonment of the plan to close St. Jerome’s, which serves a multiethnic community in a soaring structure built in 1890.
Father Doherty was assigned to St. Jerome’s Parish in 1988, the year he returned from a sabbatical in Italy, where he studied the history of sacred art at the University of Florence. A native of Bangor, he entered seminary after graduating from Notre Dame Boys Academy in Bangor in 1974. Funeral arrangements will be announced. An expanded story about Father Doherty and those who survive him will follow.
Technically it was quitting time, but I needed to get back to Riverside and find more people who knew the real Patrick. If Denny Arsenault’s tip was accurate and Patrick had overdosed, I’d need to delve deep into the destruction of lives caused by his church’s near-implosion.
The morning’s blue sky had given way to afternoon clouds, and a steady rain was falling. Hoping to follow up on our breakfast conversation, I swung into Rufe’s driveway on my way home. Perhaps he was more of an acquaintance than a friend of Patrick’s, but my former landlord might have an idea how I could find the dead priest’s actual friends, who might have known about his precarious mental state.
Rufe was in his tiny office, busy at the computer. Without much preamble I related the gist of my coffee shop conversation without revealing who’d fed me the information about the empty pill bottle in Patrick’s pocket.
“That’s a crazy rumor. Pat wouldn’t have killed himself.” Rufe eased into a kitchen chair, his giant hands and resonant voice shaking.
Again, Pat, not Patrick. Did that mean Rufe knew him very well, or not well at all?
“It’s more than a rumor. It’s actively being investigated.”
“I don’t buy it. He loved life too much. People like him don’t kill themselves.”
“Maybe Patrick wasn’t as happy as he appeared to be. A lot of public figures hide behind a persona. In private, they’re totally different.”
Rufe shook his head like Christie’s sixteen-year-old son when he’s in a stubborn head space. “Pat wasn’t an unhappy person putting on an act.”
Wondering how he could be so certain, I softened my voice when I asked again how he knew the dead priest.
He addressed the table. “We met maybe three years ago. Through mutual friends. We never hung out by ourselves.”
“I wouldn’t think he was your type.”
“It wasn’t that kind of relationship.”
Despite my glib comment, I wasn’t seriously suggesting Rufe might have hooked up with a Catholic priest, but I was struck by the ferocity in my friend’s voice. He was sensitive about Patrick.
“Don’t be thinking because he was an acquaintance of mine, he was gay. I knew him through friends, not gay friends, a mixed group. And I didn’t know him for long, but I admired the hell out of him.”
“Sorry, man. I thought you knew him in passing. For what it’s worth, I admired him, too.”
Rufe looked across the table at me, his dark eyes shiny.
“There aren’t enough good people in the world. Pat was one of the best.” He vaulted out of his chair and grabbed a leather jacket off the hook next to his kitchen door.
“I’ve got to go,” Rufe said. “This possible suicide thing is going to wind up in your paper or leak out on Facebook or Twitter. There are people who need to hear it from me first.”
He was gone before I could tell him I didn’t have the attribution necessary to write a story saying Patrick’s death might have been at his own hand. Driving the few blocks to my own house, I wondered at his reaction. Rufe and I had been friends since I’d moved to Riverside a decade earlier. When I rented the apartment over his garage, I was swept into the world of a hip, generous gay man who had enormous talent both in plumbing and musical theater. He’d become the older brother I’d never had, and the confidant business went both ways. Our social circles didn’t fully overlap, but I had a pretty good sense of who was in his life and vice-versa. It was weird for him to be secretive about exactly how he knew Patrick, and to be so close to the vest about the friends they shared.
There was no reason he had to tell me, but it was odd that he didn’t. Rufe didn’t keep important stuff from me. At least I thought he didn’t.
Chapter Three
Nineteen men sat in a ragged circle. Most leaned back in their chairs, legs stretched toward the center, booted feet crossed at the ankles. Slouching was the most comfortable way to make it through a meeting in butt-busting folding chairs. Not that comfortable was a word any of them would have used that night. Rain drummed at the windows, a stand-in for the tears that Rufe felt sure all of them had shed when they heard about Pat’s death.
“I dr
ead the fucking funeral. All the big shots will be acting like they knew Pat, like he was their buddy.”
The speaker was Chuck, the youngest long-term member of the invitation-only, very private support group known as Frig It. Skilled at calling out bullshit, Chuck’s irreverence irritated some, but it never had bothered Father Patrick Doherty.
“A few fancy-ass people were interviewed on the TV news tonight. I was screaming at the set, because nobody they talked to had a clue about Pat, how he—what the fuck is the word?—transcended the role of holy man.”
Bald head shining, Sam leaned forward, elbows on his knees, chin in his hands. “If you plan to go to the funeral, get yourself in a good head space first. The speakers will think they’re paying tribute, but everything they’ll say will be bullshit.”
Rufe watched the faces of his compadres as they struggled to process Pat’s death, but said nothing himself. Feeling raw and dispirited, he’d debated whether to attend the meeting. Eventually he kicked himself out the door and into his truck, because usually the nights he most needed to go to therapy were the nights he didn’t want to go.
Frig It was a phonetic corruption of FWGYT, an acronym for the group’s slogan—Friends Will Get You Through. Rufe had been an off-and-on member since it was formed in the early 1980s, a time when he was lugging around an enormous amount of grief after losing so many friends and an ex-lover to AIDS. The central operating principal of the group was that on any given night, those who were hurting would get support from those who were in a good place. But the night after Pat died, no one was in a good place.
“I’m gonna go, but I reserve the right to stand up and walk out in the middle if it turns into a charade.”
Chuck’s temper tantrum stirred up Doug, a retired lawyer who’d been guided to Frig It by an in-the-know doctor when his wife was losing her battle with ALS.
“I understand that you’re pissed that he’s dead. We all are. But you can’t get stuck in the anger. If there was one thing Pat harped on, it was that anger gets you nowhere.”
“Well I’m angry at Pat and I can’t move past it,” Chuck said. “I’m angry at him for every fucking donut he ate, every rare steak he chased with scotch, every hour he spent sitting on his ass, letting his arteries fill up with whatever shit your arteries fill up with before you drop dead of a goddamn massive heart attack when you’re only fifty-eight.”
Doug’s bark of a laugh set off a couple of others, and in moments half the room was snorting. Chuck looked like he wanted to kick them.
“Pat would be laughing with us if he were here.” Tears were running down Sam’s cheeks. “He’d think it was so funny that even after he was dead you were still trying to get him to eat right and join the fucking gym.”
Rufe headed for his truck as soon as the meeting was over. Within the group he was called Zen Man, because he never lost his cool. That he was an actor seemed lost on those who’d bestowed the nickname. He’d been holding onto his sorrow, but it was pushing toward his throat, wanting to find voice. When it did, the explosion would be uncontrollable. There were only a handful of Frig It men Rufe knew well enough to allow them to bear witness.
One was Doug, who caught up with him in the parking lot. “Me and Sammy need a post-meeting. You in?”
Rufe took a deep breath, then another. “Yeah,” he said. “Where to?”
They went to Sam’s condo on the Eastern Promenade and sat in front of a broad window, watching the storm lash Casco Bay. Sam and Doug must have sensed Rufe’s angst, because they didn’t talk, just looked at him until he took a deep breath and said what he hadn’t been able to bring himself to talk about at the meeting.
“I heard something awful today, even more awful than what we all heard.”
Doug raised the thin brows that topped his hound dog eyes. “What could be worse than Pat dying?”
Rufe struggled to give voice to the notion Joe had floated that afternoon. He rubbed his temples, where a headache was building. “A guy I know—a reporter—asked me if I thought Pat was capable of killing himself.”
Neither Doug nor Sam said a word.
“He didn’t mean what Chuck was saying tonight, that Pat killed himself a bit at a time. He was asking if he could have done it on purpose, with an overdose.”
“Overdose of what?” Sam was a pharmacist. His automatic question made Rufe wonder if Pat filled his prescriptions at Sam’s counter.
“Sleeping pills.”
“Why did your reporter friend think Pat might have taken an OD?”
“He was hedgy about that, but a source told him it was a focus of the investigation.”
“I don’t see Pat deliberately overdosing,” Sam said. “He’s tough—was tough. Managed the hellacious stress when he stood up to the bishop’s bullshit during the abuse crisis. Nothing could be worse than that. This church-shutdown furor couldn’t have been fun, but no way did it undo him.”
Doug was sitting with his back flat against his chair, uncharacteristically quiet. Recently retired from an intense career doing criminal defense work, he was always good for an opinion. In that moment he looked like he wanted to get up and run away.
“You think there’s anything to the suicide theory, Doug?”
The lawyer shrugged, cleared his throat. “There were a lot of layers to Pat,” he said. “He knew all kinds of people, some of whom are not nice people.”
“You mean the hotheads screaming in the churchyard all summer?”
“Those protesters aren’t bad people. They’re just hurting,” Doug said. “But I happen to know Pat had become acquainted recently with some people who are associated with potentially dangerous people. I had the sense he was seeking them out because he was facing considerable financial stress.”
“Financial stress?” Sam said. “How could that be? He was a priest. He didn’t pay a mortgage or even buy his own groceries.”
“I don’t know the details. Only that he was worried about money.”
“Potentially dangerous people?” Rufe spoke in a low voice. “Do you mean criminals?”
Doug nodded.
“How do you know this?”
“Because I introduced them.”
Chapter Four
I ate a quick supper that evening with Christie and her son Theo. I’d had more meals at their house than I could count over the years, but my role had shifted as winter turned to spring. Without any of us acknowledging it out loud, Christie had begun to relate to me as a quasi-parent. I suspected this was a tryout for how reliable I’d be if she and I wound up together, a concept still in the tentative stage.
God knows Theo needed the support. Since he’d connected with his biological father, the kid had been caught in the eye of an emotional hurricane. One day he’d be angry and hands-off, the next he’d be as sweet and playful as he’d been when he was twelve. The boy-man needed a male adult he could trust, and that turned out to be me, which was cool on one hand and terrifying on another.
Lately he’d been a motormouth when his mother wasn’t around, but he barely grunted when she was in the room. My own mother had died when I was a baby, so I’d never personally gone through the separation ritual teenage boys inflict on their moms. It was excruciating to watch.
The complicating factor—so often true in my life—was romance. After more than a decade of friendship, Christie and I finally had become lovers, a happy truth she insisted we keep to ourselves for the time being. Citing her son’s volatility, Christie was determined to wait for an imagined perfect moment to break the news. Not only was there no such thing as a perfect time for such a conversation, I was pretty sure Theo already had figured it out on his own. I kept my mouth shut, because he continued to act as though he didn’t know. My take? He was responding to his mother’s need to keep him in the dark, but no sixteen-year-old boy on the face of the ea
rth is in the dark about who in his immediate vicinity is having sex.
In fact, Christie and I weren’t in anything like a regular lovemaking groove, but that was beside the point. Theo looked me in the eye after he returned from a late summer visit to his father’s place in Florida, a look that suggested he realized that while he’d been away, Christie and I finally had taken the leap. At some point Christie would have to sit down and talk to her son about us. I was pretty sure he would handle it just fine. Theo was wound up about a lot of things, but I didn’t sense his mother and I being together was high on the list.
That evening Christie made chicken quesadillas and I put together a salad while Theo complained about the ramped-up security measures at Riverside High School.
“That bleacher bomb went off Saturday night. By Monday morning they’d turned the school into a prison camp. No one is allowed to go outside in the middle of the day. If you forget a book in your car, you have to go to the principal’s office for an escort who will walk you out to get it. Teachers are in the friggin’ bathrooms during every break, standing there next to the sinks, arms crossed, looking pissed.”
Christie slipped over to the kitchen table and put her hand on her son’s back. “I know the whole bombing situation has you upset, but can you watch your language?”
“Sorry.” Theo collapsed his wiry torso against the table, as though his bones were melting. “But the imprisonment tactics are annoying.”
“It’s no surprise they have the place on virtual lockdown,” I said. “The bombings are getting hairy. The first two looked like pranks, but the one that wrecked the bleachers could have killed somebody.”
Theo yawned like he hadn’t slept in a week. “The whole thing is stupid.”
“There’s got to be talk about who’s behind the bombs. What’s the buzz on Facebook?”
“Facebook is where people your age gossip. Kids don’t use it much.”
Truth Beat Page 3
