The Confession

by James E. McGreevey

  Being a cop earned you automatic security and respect. In our world, it was one of the best jobs you could have, just a notch below the priesthood. Yet the dress blues never came with much money, and Dad’s family scraped by in the hardscrabble Lafayette side of the tracks in Jersey City. My dad recalls a spartan childhood of hand-me-down clothing and backyard vacations.

  Ireland was never far from my grandfather’s thoughts. Although he died before I turned ten, I can still hear the heavy brogue in his voice as he regaled my sisters and me with stories from Bainbridge town in the County Down or read aloud from the papers about “the Troubles in the North.” He was consumed by Unionist Protestant discrimination against Catholics, including the clergy; indeed, he’d come to America in the first place in search of freedom. “You’re halfway to heaven if you’re an American citizen,” he used to tell us.

  He joined the local Sinn Fein chapter here, back before the group became a subject of controversy. Mike considered Sinn Fein a noble force for Irish independence, on a par with the American revolutionaries and other freedom fighters, and saw the struggle for freedom in the North of Ireland in religious terms, as an effort to free Catholics from Protestant repression. His faith was constant, and he wore it proudly. “It doesn’t take any guts to be Catholic in the south,” he’d say. To him, the Church of Rome wasn’t just a religion but part of his core identity, no less absolute than race or gender, and it fostered within him a thirst for justice and equality. The streets of Protestant communities in Ireland were paved, he complained, while the streets of his own Catholic ghetto were strewn with rubble; Protestant schools were properly lit and equipped with books while Catholic schools were poor, the backward domain of the Church. Protestant men enjoyed employment opportunities, while the Patricks and Michaels of the Catholic neighborhoods were typically unemployed. Once he arrived on American shores, my grandfather’s social conscience gave him a great affinity for African Americans and other downtrodden minorities.

  Mike’s first wife, my paternal grandmother, Margaret Hart, died long before I was born, while giving birth to my aunt Roseanne. She left behind five children, and Mike did what widowers did at the time: he sent the kids to live with his sister Catherine Cullen and her husband, Frank, a record keeper for the Railway Express, while he went looking for a new bride.

  In my recollection, Catherine was the epitome of the lace-curtain Irish Catholic—prim and immaculate, empathetic and extremely resourceful. I remember hearing one story about her that’s almost certainly apocryphal, but might as well be true. When her beloved dog, a tall-shouldered Irish wolfhound, died, she couldn’t afford to have the local veterinarian dispose of the remains. At first she tried putting him out with the trash, but local ordinances prevented such things and the rubbish haulers left the remains behind. So Catherine put her late pet in a box, wrapped him with flowery paper and ribbons, and placed the alluring package on the backseat of her unlocked car. In certain parts of Jersey City back then, strangers could be counted on to help dispose of such things.

  That same resourcefulness helped Catherine keep Mike McGreevey’s children fed, until he met Mary Theresa McCrikard on a boat ride down the Hudson. Mary raised his children as her own and gave him two more. My father, John Patrick McGreevey, known universally as Jack, loved and respected his stepmother as much as he did his late biological mother.

  Dad was in high school when World War II began drawing to a close. He didn’t want to let the Allies close up shop before he could get over there for a taste of battle, so on August 27, 1945, his seventeenth birthday, he went to New York City to sign up with the marines. He never considered another branch. “The Marine Corps is a department of the navy,” he liked to say. “The men’s department.”

  To his dismay, they rejected him as medically unfit for duty because of a deviated septum. Not to be deterred, Dad and his best buddy, Tommy McDonald, went to a small recruiting center beneath the Newark Post Office to try again three months later. He was in luck. There was only one guy there doing physicals, and this time it was a pharmacist, not a doctor. Better yet, the man reeked of liquor. Dad saw his chance and took it, talking fast and keeping his distance, giving him no chance to peer up his nose. He was cleared that day for basic training.

  But he was still underage, and the recruiters needed permission from his parents, so without hesitation Dad signed his father’s name. Serving his country was the most important calling in my father’s life, as it remains today; I know no greater patriot—no greater American—than him. I’m sure his father was behind him all the way.

  He shipped out to Japan to join the occupation forces, then to China with an artillery company known colloquially as the China Marines. From there Dad sailed to Guam, in the South Pacific, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. His posting was as a drill instructor. There never was a man better suited for this job, as you will come to understand. In all these years, Jack never talked much about what he saw on his tour. But his fraternal bond to the corps has remained constant; every November 10 he celebrates the corps’ birthday.

  When Harry Truman committed troops to the Korean War in 1950, Dad reenlisted and served out that conflict in California, preparing soldiers for battle. For him, going from the China Marines to the so-called Hollywood Marines was a bit of a slide, but Jack McGreevey was never one to question the wisdom of the corps, and he served his new posting with undiminished patriotism. “The only difference with boot camp for the Hollywood Marines,” he jokes, “is that every night in California, I had to put chocolates on their pillows.”

  When he returned east, the GI Bill paved the way for him to enroll at Seton Hall University, a Catholic college in South Orange, New Jersey. After six years of night classes, he had a diploma…and a wife, which, he confesses, was his goal in the first place. He met my mother, Veronica Smith, in an art history class. “If you don’t think I’m the type to study art, you’re right,” my father has said. “I went to find a lady.”

  He soon made a career for himself in trucking, as director of national accounts for a firm that handled Sears and other large movers. Keeping the fleets crisscrossing the country while calming nervous contractors required equal measures of charm, logistical savvy, shrewdness, and leadership ability. Fortunately, these are my father’s abundant resources. Dad borrowed his personal motto from the Marine Corps: Plan your work and work your plan. As self-evident as it may seem, this is a profound operating principle, and much more difficult done than said. Success was never accidental, he would say; it was always the result of a vision and hard work. Dad had singular focus, and his drive was unrelenting. Every night, even after his long days at the office, Dad would sit at the kitchen table, meticulously plotting out the coming days. He never took a step without first weighing the consequences, and once he determined his precise move, he never wavered from the course or let anything stand in his way. He made his choices with perfect instincts and the swift assurance of a prizefighter. And if he ever made a mistake (hypothetically, that is—I can’t think of a significant mistake he’s made), his mind would plot out a seamless correction.

  As comfortable as my parents eventually became, they never lost track of where they came from. They never moved from the simple clapboard house where I grew up. In his free time, Dad made it his job to keep a watchful eye on hundreds of old folks in our part of the state, driving ailing veterans to the VA for checkups or elderly ladies to the pharmacy. I always knew when he had one of these errands scheduled; his mood would brighten and a familiar jauntiness entered his step. This was the highlight of his week.

  I tell you all this about my father and his family for one reason. He is not the shrinking, absent father figure whom mythology wrongly blames for “creating” homosexual children. Nor is he the overweening, underloving cartoon commonly accused of wounding the heterosexuality out of kids. There is no bigger lie about gays than the one that says that we’re created by faulty parents. My father was as loving and difficult, as demanding, forthr
ight, proud, faithful, work driven, and family focused as any man could be—an ordinary man, if you will, but by my lights unmatched. It was from him that I learned to appreciate the special privilege of being an American. I inherited his call to service and compassion for the less fortunate. And though it’s taken me much of my life to figure it out, I also learned the importance of embracing one’s unique identity. Dad is indivisibly Irish, Catholic, American, veteran, husband, father, and more—not one of those roles could be eliminated without destabilizing the great personal force that is Jack McGreevey.

  AND MY MOTHER, RONNIE? SHE IS AS FAR AS ANYONE COULD GET from the overprotective smotherer (or the emasculator or the infantalizer) conjured up by prejudice. My mother is brilliant, utterly sensible, passionate in her beliefs, and fearless in letting you know them. She wasn’t always the most effusive person; as one of her former students recently stopped me to say, she was a wonderful professor, but “Boy, was she tough!” My mom inherited, from her English-Irish parents, what we used to call an “upper lip.” She keeps her head, but speaks her mind. We kids always knew where we stood with her—and still do. Sometimes her forthrightness can be bracing, but it’s always infused with her profound love and deep intellect, as well as a liberal’s sense of fairness.

  I was sitting on her lap the day our little black-and-white burned with images of white police officers turning fire hoses on black kids in Birmingham, scattering them through the streets. I was terrified. She was furious. “It’s un-American,” she fumed. “They’re trying to right a terrible wrong, and they’re being treated like hoodlums.” The forcefulness of her beliefs—almost a moral defiance—made me sure that her side would prevail.

  One thing that may have made Mom so open-minded on social issues was that her father was a rarity in our community: a convert. Born into an Anglican family, Herbert Smith took up the Church of Rome in order to woo my Liverpudlian grandmother, Mary Theresa Brown (two of my three grandmothers were named Mary—it’s a Catholic occupational hazard). They arrived in America around the turn of the century, and ultimately Grandpa became such a part of the Jersey City Catholic community that he was named Grand Marshal of the Holy Name Society Parade, the first time that honor was bestowed on someone not born into the Church. My mother still has a newspaper clipping bearing the headline CONVERT LEADS HOLY NAME PARADE.

  In contrast to my paternal grandfather, who possessed an enormous body and even bigger voice, Herbert was lanky and elegant, and somewhat stern. He was also a bookish man, with a weakness for English history. When I was young, he used to have me sit at his knee and read through the lineage of English monarchs from Arthur to Elizabeth. I can’t imagine that many Americans in my generation can still name all the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Normans, and the Anglo-Saxons. He also drilled me on foreign affairs—and even on local union matters, which were close to his heart. Grandpa was a member of the International Union of Operating Engineers, making a good living in heavy construction.

  Being a union man, Grandpa was consciously on patrol for the Good Fight. His faith in collective bargaining never wavered. But there came a time after the Great Depression when he had a falling out with the union hall—none of us grandkids is clear on the details—and was effectively blacklisted. Work assignments stopped coming his way, which plunged the family into painful hardship. But Grandpa never turned his back on the IUOE. Eventually the feud drew to a close—as mysteriously as it began—and the Smiths were restored to the burgeoning middle class.

  He and my grandmother settled in Jersey City’s relatively comfortable Greenville section and also kept a beachside bungalow in Cliffwood Beach. It wasn’t quite the Jersey Shore, whose resorts were popular among the upper crust. No celebrities went to Cliffwood Beach, with its collection of seasonal homes standing shoulder to shoulder on the sand.

  Of all my relatives, Grandma Smith, from whom I get my curly hair, was by far the most powerful influence on my life. The Church was her whole world. She attended Mass daily. From her I learned to say a novena, the Stations of the Cross, and the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the rosary. One of my earliest memories is watching her click her thumbnail on one bead after another, to the rhythmic murmur of her prayers.

  My sisters generally found other things to occupy them during our visits, but my grandmother always asked me to sit beside her and pray the rosary with her. At first I agreed reluctantly, out of a sense of obligation; I would have preferred playing soccer outside with my grandfather. But soon I came to value these times with her. My grandmother taught me more than just the orthodoxy of religion; she helped me discover and explore my spirituality and my interior life. Teaching me to say my Our Fathers and the Apostles Creed, she showed me how to still my mind and focus on my connection with the Divine. I could feel my faith expanding as I understood Mary’s sacrifice in the virgin birth (which teaches us humility), Christ’s condemnation (a lesson in patience), and the miracle of his resurrection (the source of all faith and hope). At the end our prayers would turn to Christ himself: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who have most need of your mercy.”

  My grandmother’s spirituality was something she thought about and talked about almost constantly, something she lived. The saints and their stories were so familiar to her that it sometimes seemed as though she existed among them, gleaning strength from the lessons of their lives. Before setting out on a journey, Grandma prayed to St. Brigid of Ireland, a high-spirited adventurer; if her hairbrush was misplaced, it was St. Anthony of Padua she’d turn to—or, more likely, ask me and my sisters to invoke.

  St. Anthony, St. Anthony

  Won’t you come down?

  Something is lost and

  Can’t be found.

  Around her home, Grandma kept dozens and dozens of saint figurines—some no larger than her outstretched hand, others a foot or more high. They multiplied on her mantelpiece, windowsills, and shelves; she kept St. Anthony atop her dresser, and the Virgin Mary stood watch on the ledge over the sink. I thought of them as her spiritual militia—St. Dominic, the beekeeping monk, casting a defensive gaze toward the door, while St. Jude Thaddeus, patron saint of hospital workers like my mother, watched the flanks.

  “Is this place looking a little Italian?” Grandma once mused.

  “No, Grandma,” I said, although no other Irish house I’d visited had so many saints.

  In very unsubtle ways, Grandma let me know that she was training me for the priesthood—in particular the Jesuit priesthood, which she considered the Church’s Special Forces. Where we came from, nothing matched the thrill of having a relative receive a call from God. Whereas some Catholic families seemed to put great stock in the social value of having a priest in the family, Grandma’s motives were pure. For her, dedication to Christianity was an end in itself, its own and perfect good.

  The Smiths produced six children, including two who did not survive. My mother was their third child, named Veronica after the saint who offered Christ a towel to dry his face on the day of his crucifixion. So I suppose it was meant to be that Ronnie, as everybody calls her, would grow up to be a nurse and professor, caring for patients at New Jersey’s best hospitals while leaving her indelible mark on generations of young nursing students.

  She was still in school when she married my father in 1956, and they began their family just eleven months later. But my mother never allowed her career to take a backseat. After graduating from Seton Hall, she earned her nursing degree at St. Vincent’s in New York, then a masters at Columbia University and another at Seton Hall in preparation for a teaching career. In this regard she stood out from other women her age, especially Catholic women.

  There is no containing my mother’s ambition to be of service; it’s something I have always admired in her and I feel blessed that she passed it down to me. For her, serving others was a spiritual obligation, an integral part of God’s purpose for man on Earth. Had she been bor
n in this generation, she would almost surely have become a physician. Many of the women of her time pursued nursing or teaching—they were the major career pathways available in those days—but my mother’s commitment was its own kind of calling, one that stemmed from a deep love of medicine, a faith in the body’s capacity to heal, and a certain knowledge that God’s will prevails. Watching her tend to her patients, and to her students at Middlesex County College in Edison and Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in Plainfield, I was always awed to see how deeply Mom understands the human condition.

  In the McGreevey clan, she is our bedrock. Whenever any of us has come to her in confusion, she has talked us through to clarity. If we felt inadequate, she gave us tools to overcome. When sadness or illness strikes, she had an unfailing ability to usher us back to health.

  As I said, she wasn’t exactly indulgent, not when it came to the bumps and scrapes of childhood. Once, when I was about seven, I was playing in a park around the corner when I lost my footing and landed headfirst on a concrete bench post. My scalp split open and started streaming with blood. The wound looked much worse than it was, of course, but I ran home terrified. On my way I passed Mrs. Decelis, our next-door neighbor, who took one look at me and screamed as if she’d seen a ghost, which only frightened me more. By the time I reached our kitchen, I was sure I was close to death. Mom looked down from the dishes and sized up my condition. “Here,” she said calmly, handing me a cold, wet cloth. “Put this against your head.” My fear vanished instantly.

  My mother’s steady nerves have helped our family weather even the most heartbreaking passages. When her father, Herbert Smith, was in his late seventies, he began using a cane to steady himself as he moved around the small one-bedroom apartment he shared with my grandmother. One afternoon he left the cane leaning against a door, and my grandmother, whose vision was failing, fell over it, shattering her hip when she landed. She was rushed into surgery, but her age complicated the procedure, and my grandfather was so overcome with worry that soon he was in the same hospital as his injured wife. For five months my mother cared for them both, never leaving the hospital. But my grandfather was suffering from a broken heart, unable to forgive himself for his wife’s accident, and despite my mother’s efforts he succumbed a short time later.