by John Grogan
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far our biggest joint purchase. After we got it home and hooked up, I popped in an Anita Baker CD and danced Jenny around the living room.
When the song ended, I said, “Okay, sit down, right here on the couch. I have something for you.” I pulled a tiny box from my pocket and handed it to her. Inside was a diamond engagement ring.
Chapter 21
o
Jenny began planning in earnest for our wedding, and I began lobbying just as earnestly to make it a Catholic ceremony. I did it for the exact reason my father had warned against—to make him and Mom happy. To fix the damage and heal the wounds. I thought a Catholic wedding would make everything right again. And not just a Catholic exchange of vows, but the whole shebang: a full Catholic wedding Mass complete with the consecration of the bread and wine followed by Holy Communion. Just like they had had.
Jenny knew how important it was to me and agreed, even though it would involve weeks of instruction from a Catholic priest. For her, it was just another of the many chores that went into preparing for a wedding—find a caterer, pick a menu, buy a dress, submit to weeks of rigorous Catholic indoctrination. We agreed to get married back at Our Lady of Refuge, and I asked my two uncles, Father Vin and Father Joe, now both in retirement, to officiate. All they needed, they told us, was the official document showing we had successfully completed our religious
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training back in our home parish in Florida. I had no idea what or where my home parish was, having never bothered to look up a church near our rental house, but I wasn’t going to tell my el-derly uncles that. I found our parish, and together we signed up for instruction. We were assigned to an assistant pastor named Father David.
When he showed up at our house one evening for the first meeting, we were both surprised to see a young man dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. He had a bushy mop of hair and a day’s growth of beard; he looked more like he had arrived to teach surfing than religious instruction. Father David did not seem at all perturbed that we were living together. If he was judging us, he did not show it. Jenny instantly liked him, and by the end of the evening we were joking and laughing over wine like old friends.
The Catholic orthodoxy requires both parents, even one who is not a Catholic, to solemnly vow to raise the children in the Catholic faith, promising that they will attend Mass regularly and receive the sacraments. To Jenny, this was akin to forcing a Frenchman to pledge allegiance to Great Britain. Why, she asked, should she be required to raise her children in a religion she neither practiced nor believed in? The conciliatory Father David seemed to understand that he could not push too hard without risking losing us entirely to a justice of the peace. He proposed a compromise: that she agree only to consider raising our children Catholic when the time came. Sure, she would agree to consider it, she said, adding, “John’s the Catholic. If he wants the kids raised in his faith, then he’s going to have to be the one to do it.”
She agreed that she wouldn’t block my efforts, and Father David seemed satisfied. We signed the pledge.
“What a nice guy!” Jenny said after he left. “He’s really great.
Very reasonable. He’s nothing like those holier-than-thou stuffed shirts at your parents’ parish.” I smiled at our good fortune in finding a young, moderate priest flexible enough to bend his way
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around some of the Church’s more rigid rules. If there was a God, then Father David was God’s gift to us, the perfect priest to help me navigate the treacherous waters between my fiancée’s and my parents’ sensibilities.
But before our next weekly meeting, a distraught Father David called with bad news. His superiors had abruptly reassigned him to a job that would allow him no contact with parishioners. “They seem to think I’m a bit too much of a maverick,”
he said.
“Can’t you finish up with us?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’d like to but I can’t. I’m sorry.”
The parish reassigned us to another priest, a rotund little man with oily skin and close-set eyes that had a slightly leering quality about them. Unlike Father David, he issued edicts in absolute terms, telling us not only how we would be married but how we would live our married life. He seemed to especially enjoy talking to the young couples in our group about sex. The priest dedicated the entire final session to the joys of human sexuality.
The more he talked, the more animated he became.
Father Beady Eyes wanted us to know that once we were married we could forget everything we had been told about sex being bad and sinful. “Ignore all that,” he said. “Starting on your wedding night, none of that applies.” Sex between a married man and woman was a natural thing, a beautiful thing, even a holy and sacred thing. We were to pursue it without hesitation or guilt, with gusto even. “Enjoy it, embrace it, celebrate it!” he said, voice rising in both pitch and volume. His eyes darted from one couple to the next, as though picturing each of us on our wedding night locked in blissful, naked, steamy coitus.
I leaned over and whispered into Jenny’s ear: “I think he’s enjoying this topic just a little too much.”
“Way too much,” she whispered back. “He’s creeping me out.”
The irony of the afternoon was not lost on either of us. Here was this single, celibate man who in all likelihood had never even
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held hands with a member of the opposite sex standing before a room full of couples offering sage sex advice. It was like hiring a blind man to teach sharpshooting.
But his lack of credibility did not slow Father down. He was even more animated as he gave his blessing to various forms of sexual foreplay. “There’s nothing at all wrong with keeping things fun and interesting,” he counseled. “Feel free to spice things up.”
There was only one restriction on our free, unfettered Catholic lovemaking, Father warned, and that was that the penis always, always, always must end up in the vagina. “You must do nothing to keep the sperm from the egg. You must do nothing to subvert God’s plan.”
This led Father into a detailed description of the only form of birth control we were allowed to practice: the rhythm method.
The beauty of this form of birth control was that couples simply stopped having sex during those periods of the month deemed most fertile. The rhythm method was not a sin in the eyes of God, Father explained, because it simply entailed the absence of sex, not the enjoyment of it for some reason other than procreation. And Father insisted it could be highly effective. I knew this to be the case, as evidenced by all those families I’d grown up with back at Our Lady of Refuge with ten, twelve, even fourteen children. My own mother was one of nine, and she swore by the rhythm method. One thing we could all agree on: it worked with 100 percent effectiveness as long as you weren’t having sex.
I could sense Jenny nearing her boiling point. At any second she might leap to her feet and tell Father Beady Eyes what she really thought of him and his advice. And I knew she would want to throw in something about his salacious leer as well. “We’re almost through,” I whispered, as I might if she were undergoing a root canal. “Just sit tight. Nearly over.” I offered her my hand to squeeze.
Father left us with one final thought: “When you and your spouse are engaged in sexual union, remember you are not
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making love with each other. You are making love with our Lord Jesus Christ.” We then all bowed our heads as Father led us in prayer that Jesus would bless our wedding-night union with his presence.
Father Beady Eyes handed us the official document showing we had successfully completed religious marriage instruction, and we bolted through the doors and into the sunshine. When we reached the car, I pushed Jenny against the door and kissed her.
“Making love with Jesus!” I exclaimed. “A threesome!
Now that I did not expect to hear.”
She burst into laughter, and I could feel her relax in my arms.
I knew I definitely owed her big-time for this one.
We set our wedding date for Labor Day weekend, but first came Rock’s wedding. Of all my old friends from the neighborhood, Rock was the one with whom I had stayed closest. Even as college and careers took us in opposite directions, we remained best friends, traveling together, camping, and double-dating. I had largely lost track of Tommy and Sack and the others, but not Rock. Now he was getting married in Chicago, just three months before our planned date, and I wouldn’t think of missing it. Only after booking our flights did I learn that the guest list included my parents, to whom Rock was almost like a fourth son after years as a regular presence in our home. Other parents from the neighborhood would be attending as well, and we were all staying in the same hotel. It would be my first time seeing them since Jenny and I had moved in together, and I feared that the sight of their son and future daughter-in-law sharing a room before marriage would be painful for them—not only on moral grounds, but social, as well. They no doubt had kept our cohabitation a secret; now it would be obvious to all their friends and neighbors attending the wedding. More salt in their already raw wounds.
And yet I kept telling myself, “You have nothing to hide. You
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have nothing to be ashamed of. This is their problem, not yours.”
In preparation for marriage, and feeling our Catholic instruction had fallen somewhat short, Jenny and I had signed up for premarriage counseling with a therapist. The sessions were designed to help couples understand and address the challenges of marriage in advance and to teach relationship skills, including how to resolve conflicts without leaving lasting scars. In the first session, I immediately launched into a lengthy description of the tension with my parents over our cohabitation. I fully expected the therapist, an affable and warm man named John Adams, to take my side and chastise Jenny for not being more sympathetic to my dilemma. I wanted him to tell her she really needed to be more accommodating of my parents’ sensibilities.
But Dr. Adams seemed bewildered by my concerns. “You’re how old again?” he asked. I told him, and he continued, “Do you live at home with your parents?”
“No.”
“Do you rely on them to support you?”
“No.”
“Do you owe them money?”
“No.”
“College loans?”
“No.”
“Do they pay your car insurance? Your grocery bill? Your utili -
ties?”
By now I was getting the point. He raised his hands in the air. “So why do you let them control your life? What will they do to you?”
“Well, you see, it’s just that . . .”
“You don’t want to disappoint them,” he said, finishing my sentence. “I understand that. But there’s a way to be respectful of your parents and their mores without letting them run your life.”
Dr. Adams dedicated a lot of our premarriage counseling to
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helping me find a way to break free of their gravitational pull. I was overdue to live my own life without worrying how they would judge it. I needed to be myself without apology, he counseled, and then it would be up to them to accept me or not. With his advice in mind, I arrived in Chicago, determined to enjoy the weekend with my live-in girlfriend just as I would if they weren’t there. I braced for the fallout.
But when we met my parents in the hotel lobby, all was breezily pleasant. They treated us to lunch, and we had an easy, comfortable conversation. Not a heavy word was uttered. We exchanged small gifts, and Jenny briefed my mother on the wedding preparations. Mom, for the umpteenth time, regaled us with the funny story of her own wedding day, how nervous Dad was and how Father Joe overslept and almost missed the ceremony.
Dad sat and smiled, nodding his head as he always did when his wife held court.
That evening we sat with them at the wedding Mass, and Mom and Dad smiled up at me as I read a scripture passage from the altar, at Rock’s request. They seemed to enjoy the reception.
Only the next morning, as we prepared to check out of the hotel, did I finally see what simmered just below the surface. I left Jenny in our hotel room while I went two doors down to visit my parents. I was barely inside the door when they let loose. They had their son to themselves for a moment; this was their chance to speak candidly.
“John, we have something important we want to talk to you about,” Dad said.
And then, immediately, Mom: “We don’t think you should have a Mass at your wedding.”
At first I misunderstood their intent. I thought they were trying to spare Jenny and me the longer ceremony if it wasn’t what we really wanted. I figured they knew we were acting more for their sake than our own. “No, really, we don’t mind,” I said.
“The full Mass is fine with both of us.”
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“You don’t understand,” Dad said. “We don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You don’t?”
“We don’t think it’s right given how you’re living.”
“How I’m living?”
“Living in sin,” Mom said. “John, you are living in a state of sin. And you’re flaunting it. Look at you, staying together in this hotel in front of everyone.”
“You’d be making a mockery of the Mass,” Dad continued.
“Oh,” I said.
“Jenny’s not a Catholic. From what we can tell, you aren’t a practicing Catholic anymore,” he said. “It would be hypocritical.
The Mass should not be window dressing.”
The message was slowly sinking in, and I reeled from their words. I was no longer worthy. No longer fit to participate in that singularly most important, transforming experience of their lives, the Eucharist.
“Okay,” I said. “We don’t have to have a Mass.”
“It seems to us you’ve lost all your faith,” Dad said. Just two weeks earlier they had returned from a pilgrimage to the tiny village of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina where believers claim the Virgin Mary had repeatedly appeared. Their breathless, unquestioning description of the alleged miracles had made me wince. Dad said he could tell from my muted response that I no longer shared their beliefs.
“Dad,” I said. “Faith is a gift. You can’t force it on someone.
It’s always come so effortlessly to you.”
“Tell us the truth,” Mom interjected. “Do you still go to church?”
I looked at her for a long moment. Studied her face, the face I had lied to so many times over so many years. “No,” I said. “Not for a long, long time.”
My mother acted as if she had taken a hit to the chest, knock-
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ing the wind out of her. She rested one hand on the chair back and stared out the window as if studying something far off on the interstate. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not Jenny,” I quickly added. “Don’t think it’s Jenny. I stopped going long before I ever met her. Long before.”
We stood in a circle, saying nothing. “Look, I need to get going,” I said. I was opening the door when Dad’s voice boomed after me.
“John!”
I froze, then turned back. As I did he threw himself against me and buried his face in my shoulder, locking me in a grip so tight it was as if he would never let go. I felt him shaking, his chest lurching against me. Then I felt a warm wetness on my neck and heard his sobs, his jagged gasps. The man I had never seen shed a tear, my Rock of Gibraltar, was crying in my arms.
Soon Mom joined us, wrapping her arms around both Dad and me and crying uncontrollably. I imagine the sight of her husband weeping was too much to bear. I looked down at her face and it was filled with so much anguish I thought of Michelang
elo’s Pietà, showing the sorrowful Virgin Mary holding Jesus’ body. I stood dry-eyed, sandwiched between them, rocking gently, awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” I murmured, unsure if it was loud enough for them to hear. I was sorry, not for my actions, not for loving Jenny and wanting to be with her, not for failing to embrace those beliefs my parents embraced. But sorry for how much pain I had caused them. Sorry for the years of deception and now for the sucker punch of revelations that so quickly shredded, like shrap-nel to the heart, all they had allowed themselves to believe for so long. Sorry for the gaping rift our religious differences had torn in the fabric of an otherwise loving family.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, louder.
Finally Dad raised his head and wiped his face. His compo-
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sure fully back, he said in a voice as strong as ever, “You’re going to be late.”
Back in my room, I found Jenny packing. “How’d it go with your parents?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. “We just chatted.”
“Good. No more heavy stuff?”
“Nope. Not at all.”
The next weekend, the phone rang and it was Dad. He sounded sheepish.
“Listen,” he said. “I want you to try to forget everything we said in the hotel room in Chicago. We were out of place. It’s your wedding, John. If you want a Mass, you should have a Mass.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I appreciate that. Jenny and I talked it over. We won’t be having the Mass.”
Chapter 22
o
Mom nearly succeeded in sabotaging the wedding.
Not that she was consciously trying to. I would
never accuse her of that. But how else to explain
the sandwich she made for me a mere ninety minutes before I was to walk down the aisle to meet my bride?
On September 2, 1989, I awoke before dawn on the foldout couch in my parents’ basement. Jenny was staying with friends across town, and as tradition dictated, we were not to see or speak to each other until we met at the altar later that day. My stomach churned away like a washing machine, and my bowels rumbled.