Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  When John protested, she raised a finger and said, “Straight to the secretary, and right back out, Patrick. Don’t go any further. You’ve had enough trouble there.”

  John was nervous all day.

  “What did the secretary say?” he asked when his brother came home that night.

  “Best application she’s ever seen.”

  “Really?”

  “No. She didn’t say anything.”

  He waited and waited for a letter, a call. Months passed. Finally, his father called to see what the status was. That was when they learned that the school had never gotten his application.

  Charlie roared at Patrick about it. Patrick said he couldn’t remember whether he’d brought the application in or not.

  There was no doubt in John’s mind that he had done it on purpose. Pat showed no remorse. He couldn’t graduate from Saint Ignatius, so John wouldn’t either. And maybe Nora felt this way too. She said that either way, it was no great loss.

  “The bus ride from Hull would be endless,” she said. “Can you imagine it, John?”

  A week passed and all she could say to him was, “Go tell your father you’re not too upset, so he’ll lay off your brother.”

  After that, John understood that his brother had never liked him. He hardened his heart to Patrick. Still, as they got older, in times of trouble, Patrick had no problem turning to him. He never asked Bridget or Brian for money. He knew they had none to give. John had cosigned leases, lent Pat thousands of dollars he knew he’d never see again. The summer John got married, Pat didn’t have a car. John let him borrow his for the entire month of July, while he and Julia were away on their honeymoon. Patrick got God knows how many parking tickets, which John only learned about in September, when he came out of a dinner with clients to find a boot on his Mercedes.

  He found a way to laugh about it. The story became a punch line.

  When Patrick had his windfall, he spent most of the money on the bar, but some of it he blew on stupid gestures—a fur coat for Nora, which she would never wear. A riding mower for Charlie, even though the lawn was not that big. When the Powerball went to an unprecedented four hundred million, Patrick spent a grand on tickets, tossing them like confetti on Christmas Eve, wanting everyone to get in on the action. He never offered to pay John back what he owed him.

  Even then, John managed to stay cordial. He thought he deserved some credit for that. When Charlie got sick, John took the whole family on a trip to Ireland. He paid for them all, including Patrick, without complaint.

  Their most recent fight, eight months ago, had been one of the worst. They hadn’t spoken since. Of course he felt bad about that now. He wasn’t expecting Patrick to drive into a wall and die. Had he known, maybe things would have ended differently. But John would be damned if he let himself feel guilty. It had all been Patrick’s fault.

  You should have compassion for him, John, Nora said. Things haven’t come so easily to him, the way they have to you.

  Like he had done nothing to earn his success.

  He’s your brother, John.

  As if brotherhood were sacrosanct. As if no matter what a brother did to you, there was no choice but to forgive and forgive and forgive.

  In the past year, outside of family parties, they had run into each other three times. Once at a wake. Once at a fund-raiser. And then at a Red Sox game, both of them sitting right behind the dugout. John was there with clients. He had paid through the nose for the tickets. Patrick was with Fergie, many beers into the night. He had probably charmed or bribed his way to the front.

  What annoyed John most was that Pat always seemed to be having a hell of a lot more fun than he was. He supposed that’s what your life could look like if you had no responsibilities. People John knew from Dorchester spoke of his brother with reverence. Great kid, they’d say, even now that Patrick was fifty years old.

  —

  John had never been to Patrick’s apartment. He double-parked in front of the address his mother had provided. A small, shabby-looking brick building.

  Julia offered to go in for him, but he was afraid of what she might find.

  “Just make sure no one taps my bumper.”

  “I’ll fight them to the death,” she said.

  As he shut the car door, his phone started to vibrate in his pocket. He assumed it would be Nora, but when he pulled out the phone, he saw Rory McClain’s home number.

  “Rory,” he said, picking up. “Your ears must be burning. I’m in Dorchester. Just saw one of your signs.”

  “Is that right?” Rory’s tone was hesitant. “Listen, John, I don’t want to keep you. I just wanted to say that I heard about your brother. I wanted to send my condolences.”

  “That’s kind of you. Thanks.”

  John noticed a woman about Pat’s age smoking on the stoop. She wore a winter coat over bare legs, fluffy white slippers. She had foam curlers in her hair and sunglasses on.

  “I’m not going to be able to make the wake,” Rory said.

  “Oh. Sure. I understand.”

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” Rory said. “This is hard to say. How do I put this? I should have mentioned it sooner. When we started working together maybe, or, I don’t know. I guess I’d be lying if I said it never crossed my mind that it could come up. But you’re the best at what you do, John. I wanted the best.”

  “What are you talking about?” John said.

  Julia was watching him from the car, confused. She gestured for him to get inside and out of the cold, like he might have forgotten why they had come.

  “Patrick and I had kind of a history together,” Rory said. “That thing at your country club, it wasn’t totally out of nowhere. This is why I didn’t want the Globe to run that story about me and Pete O’Shea. About what happened to him. The thing is, Patrick was the one who did it. Who blinded him. It wasn’t a robbery, John. It was a fight. I was there too. It was right before your family moved away.”

  He thought of the police officers at the door. He thought of his mother, suddenly hell-bent on Hull.

  “Jesus,” John said.

  “I never blamed him,” Rory said. “No one ever pressed any charges. We made up that story about a robbery to protect ourselves. We were all as guilty as sin.”

  “Guilty of what?”

  “It was a bad situation that got out of control. Just stupid kid stuff. But I can’t stop thinking about the article yesterday, wondering if he saw it. I pray it had nothing to do with—” He stopped talking.

  “I should go,” John said. “But thanks for telling me. I’m glad you did.”

  He wasn’t glad, but what the hell else could he say?

  John squeezed past the woman smoking on the stoop, feeling like a visitor from some other planet.

  “Pardon me,” he said.

  Inside, it smelled like cooking. Like Pam and grease and burnt toast. He followed the grubby hallway to the end, as Nora had instructed. The apartment was on the ground floor. Last door on the right, she’d said.

  Patrick had a brown doormat with the word WELCOME printed on it. John wasn’t sure why this should surprise him, the deep uncoolness of it.

  He took the key from under the mat and opened the door. He was expecting pizza boxes and beer bottles on every surface, signs of a party. But the apartment was orderly, spare. Had his mother already cleaned? On the living room wall, there was a poster of Fenway Park in a cheap plastic frame. John kept moving, down the hall, into the kitchen. A sad little space with fluorescent lights, painted a cheery yellow, which somehow made it seem even sadder. He opened the fridge and found it empty but for a half-drunk bottle of blue Gatorade. The freezer contained only vodka and three Lean Cuisines.

  He had a flash of his own house, the impressive brick façade and clean white columns. The massive lilac bushes that bloomed white in springtime.

  The notion that no one was to blame for Patrick’s death but Patrick himself was something John had been positive of unti
l this moment. But was he, on some level, responsible? For pushing the article, for teaming up with Rory in the first place?

  Nora had told John to stay away.

  Patrick had blinded someone. John couldn’t imagine his mother knowing such a thing, keeping silent all these years. She could only have known in some vague maternal sense that Pat was in trouble, that they needed to go away.

  He had to tell somebody. Bridget. Nora.

  Things haven’t come so easily to him, the way they have to you.

  It was true. Things had come easily.

  John followed the dim hallway until he reached the bedroom.

  He was the oldest now.

  He went to the window, pulled back the shitty blinds, and took in the sight of his girls, his world, waiting for him on the other side.

  15

  THE STORY OF THE DAY Patrick was born was a hallmark of the family mythology, repeated again and again by their father. Like all Charlie’s stories, it got bigger, funnier, more impressive over time. Patrick came into the world fifteen minutes after they reached the hospital, the fastest birth on record at Saint Margaret’s. They had rushed there, Nora shouting Hail Marys all the way, Charlie running every red light. He didn’t have time to buy cigars, but one of the richest men in Boston happened to be in the waiting room—depending on the day, Charlie might claim it was the mayor or a millionaire lawyer or a judge. The man gave him a box of the finest Cubans. So happy was Charlie to have a son that he insisted everyone smoke them, even the nurses.

  Bridget’s father had told this story every year on Patrick’s birthday, until he was gone. Five years had passed since she last heard it.

  She thought of this now, as they followed Nantasket Avenue all the way out to Hull, waiting for the moment when the town would appear at the tip of the peninsula, a sight she had loved since the family moved here the summer she was ten. She thought then that she had been given the greatest gift. Each day, she swam until her fingers pruned, the water bitter cold. She bought a Bomb Pop from the ice cream truck and adored how it dripped red, white, and blue down her chin. She forgot September would come again.

  The extended family in Dorchester whispered about where her parents had gotten the money for the house. Bridget overheard her uncle Jack say that Charlie won it gambling. The neighbors downstairs, who were distant cousins, believed they had been cheated out of some phantom inheritance.

  Charlie said they had simply saved well. But Bridget and John suspected Aunt Kitty had been the one to help their parents. In the early seventies, her long-estranged husband died of a sudden heart attack while out jogging. They had never divorced. Kitty inherited all his money. Bridget was told that the man had died before she had ever been told he existed.

  Maybe it explained why it felt as if Kitty was their responsibility. Nora acted indebted to her, taking her advice, or at least pretending to. Charlie did everything for his sister that a husband ought to do, usually before he did it at his own house—the raking and the shoveling and the repairs. Nora never complained. In recent years, she had cared for Kitty, bringing her groceries and oversize bottles of wine, shuttling her to appointments at the hospital and the hair salon.

  Hull was a summer town. Most of the cottages on the bay weren’t even insulated. Nine months a year, only every third house was occupied. On a grey winter day, it could feel bleak, depressing. Today this seemed right, given the occasion. They had buried her father on a glorious sunny morning, a backdrop that felt almost vulgar at the time.

  Bridget tensed as Natalie swerved a hair over the yellow line and ever so slightly into the oncoming lane before correcting herself. She wasn’t used to driving the van. Wasn’t used to driving at all. Usually Bridget did it, but today Natalie had insisted.

  You were up all night, sweetie. You need to rest.

  Never mind that she had been up too.

  When Charlie died, Bridget came alone, her hands shaking the whole way. She had to pull over four or five times. It was such a comfort, having Natalie beside her.

  They passed Ahearn’s Bakery, and Bridget noted the rainbow flag flying out front. It had been there a few years now.

  Marie Ahearn’s parents owned the bakery. She was the first girl Bridget ever kissed. Bridget knew from Facebook that Marie came out to her enormous Catholic family years ago and it went like a dream. The Ahearns had adapted. After college, Marie moved in with a woman she met working at State Street Bank. They got married. Marie’s mother made them a three-tiered wedding cake with two marzipan brides on top. Now they had a house in Newburyport and a twenty-foot blowup of Pat Patriot, which they inflated and displayed on their front lawn on game days.

  If anyone had told Bridget when she was young that Massachusetts would be the first state in the nation to legalize same sex marriage, she never would have believed it. The world had opened up in ways she hadn’t seen coming. But her family had not. They all knew Bridget was gay, with the possible exception of Nora. It was something her brothers accepted, but they didn’t celebrate it. Or even talk about it much. Sometimes she wished this age of openness hadn’t come when she herself was still locked in some fundamental way. Maybe it would have been better, easier, if people just agreed to keep their sexuality to themselves.

  Natalie would think Bridget was deranged if she said it out loud. They were about to bring a child into the world. The child (a boy, she was already sure of it) would see them, as they could see their own parents, from so close up. It made her desperate to find a way to be better, now. Before he arrived.

  She realized they had missed the turnoff.

  “Bang a u-ey,” Bridget said.

  Natalie gave her a surprised grin. “Excuse me?”

  “Turn around.”

  “I like when your Boston comes out.”

  Bridget smiled. As a kid, she never would have believed that she’d leave. Even after she did, New York wasn’t supposed to be forever. There was a constant pull toward home. Every time she heard the church bells ring in her neighborhood in Brooklyn, she thought of Nora. On a nice afternoon in spring, she might think of the crowds at Fenway Park, how the opening notes of “Dirty Water” put a lump in her throat. But Bridget had accepted that she could never move back here for good, even if she wanted to. She had put it from her mind.

  A minute into town, Natalie slowed to a stop at a red light. Nantasket Beach was on their right. Once, Paragon Park had stood on the other side of the road, running parallel to the water, the horizon eclipsed by a white roller coaster. From its highest peak, you could see the city skyline in the distance. Now the park was gone, condos put up in its place. Only the carousel and the penny arcade remained, as if to assure you that you hadn’t dreamed it all. Amazing how the people and places that once mattered most would vanish, and still you carried on.

  When they first decided to use a sperm donor, Natalie asked if Bridget thought one of her brothers might want to do it.

  “Then the baby would be related to us both,” she said.

  “Dear God, no,” Bridget said.

  The thought of having such a conversation with any of her brothers was unfathomable.

  But now, part of her wished they had asked Patrick. He was the handsomest of all the boys. For the rest of her life, she might have gotten to see his face smiling back at her, instead of the face of International Archeologist/Number 4592.

  —

  They reached Peachtree Street and Natalie accelerated up the hill, making them both jolt backward.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Take it easy there, lead foot.”

  When they got to the house, she parked the van behind Nora’s car in the driveway.

  “Let me just call the shelter and check in,” Bridget said, reaching for her cell phone in the cup holder.

  Natalie put a hand on her hand.

  “I’m sure Michelle’s got it under control,” she said. “Bridget. Just be here.”

  She nodded. They got out.

  A brand-new SUV Bridge
t didn’t recognize sat at the curb. On the back of the SUV, a BMW, was an oval-shaped bumper sticker that contained the letters OFD.

  Originally from Dorchester.

  “Oh Jesus, John,” she said.

  She supposed he had to be seen in Boston, had to defend the idea that he loved Dorchester so damn much but chose to live in Weston, chose to send his daughter to some pretentious prep school. Still. Bridget would have to give him shit for it. It was all that he deserved.

  She unloaded the bags from the back as Natalie led the dog up the front steps.

  Bridget followed, thinking of how she would walk right into Natalie’s parents’ house, a member of the family. But here, Natalie—her friendly, outgoing Natalie—waited to be let in.

  When Bridget opened the door, Rocco raced toward the kitchen, leash trailing behind.

  They could hear low voices down the hall.

  “Are you ready?” Natalie said.

  “No,” Bridget said. “Let’s go home.”

  From a stand in the corner, the Infant of Prague stared at them. The statue wore a red satin robe, a sky blue crown. It had been decapitated countless times over the years, by hockey sticks and flying elbows. Nora always dutifully glued the head back on.

  Bridget dropped the bags in front of Julia and John’s enormous wedding portrait. A friend of their cousin’s, a crime scene photographer with the Boston Police Department, had taken all the pictures that day. He gave them a terrific deal but he had no idea how to take a photo of a living human being. The shots were stiff and posed, or else he only managed to capture a shoe, an elbow.

  She hung their coats and then they followed the dog into the kitchen.

  Brian was leaning against the counter in his suit, staring off into space, his eyes glassy. Wasted or crying, she couldn’t tell. There were three empty beer bottles lined up behind him and a fresh one in his hand. Whenever Bridget pictured him, he was still in peak shape, all muscle, the body of an athlete. It took her by surprise to be reminded that he had let himself get kind of fat. The sight of that double chin, the paunch beneath his shirt, depressed her.