“One time I forgot to clean my room,” I told him. “Is that a sin?”
Walter shrugged. “Put it in anyway,” he said. “There’s no downside. If it is a sin, you’ll be in more trouble leaving it off.” Now, that was a lesson in morals.
After trading notes with Walter, I decided to confess everything on my master list. Together we rehearsed dozens of times, training for our first confessions like other kids drilled for spelling-bee finals.
When the time came, our entire second grade class was summoned to form one long line in the school’s vast hallway, then snaked to the school multipurpose room. There, wheeled in only on special occasions, was the confessional booth—a blond-wood, two-doored source of foreboding mystery to us all. We studied the faces of each boy and girl when they left the tiny chamber. Some emerged giggling or pink with shame. Still others appeared triumphant, as though the experience had bestowed on them a terrific peace of mind. I was filled with awe.
Walter’s turn came just before mine. He tucked himself behind the towering door with confidence, but I breathed uneasy with him in there. I knew his confession so well by now that I rolled through it in my head just as I knew he was doing with the priest. When I finished, I was surprised that the door didn’t swing open. For a long time he didn’t emerge. The nuns had told us that priests sometimes asked for more information. What hidden nuance could they have found in Walter’s confession, I wondered? What unsuspected sin lurked among his words?
At last, he was released. When I passed him on my way in, his face gave no hint of his ordeal.
The door was heavier than I expected; the whole confessional shuddered when it closed behind me. Inside the air was tight, yet somehow it also felt charged. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness as I groped for the right place to kneel. As I made the sign of the cross, my heart pounded so loudly I worried it would drown out my words. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I began. “This is my first confession. I accuse myself of the following sins. I was mean to Caroline twice. I talked back to my parents once. On seven occasions I didn’t clean my room. Once I forgot my chores.”
As I spoke I glanced up to the grate and was surprised to see the familiar profile of Father Gaydos, the businesslike pastor at St. Joe’s. No doubt about it: that was his familiar flattop, his unmistakable square nose. I even recognized the sound of his labored breathing. And I’m sure he knew exactly who I was; he’d known me my whole life.
When he began pronouncing my absolution, though, our familiarity did nothing to undermine the power of the ritual. “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” he said, and I felt cleansed. Though my penance was paltry—three Hail Marys, one Our Father, and a Glory be—the sensation of grace was intense.
SHORTLY THEREAFTER, MY FATHER CALLED ME TO HIS BEDROOM for a meeting. This was unusual. Typically Dad spoke his mind around the kitchen table. I’d never been summoned down the dark hallway on the second floor before. I was filled with anxiety and curiosity alike.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Dad said gravely, motioning for me to sit down on the bed. He reached into a dresser drawer and removed an old manila envelope, then sat beside me.
I noticed his hands tremble slightly as he opened the clasp and removed the envelope’s contents, placing a number of letters and photographs in his lap. At a glance I saw that they concerned James Edward McGreevey, my namesake.
He took a breath. “My father was going to leave the body over there originally in Iwo Jima, but then he found out that the base might be turned over to the Japanese. And he said, ‘To hell with that. We’ll bring the body home.’”
He handed me Uncle Jimmy’s funeral Mass prayer card. “Jimmy was my hero,” he said. “That’s why I named you for him. I always wanted a son to carry on his name, his tradition.”
I nodded.
“Before he went to the Marine Corps he was a boxer. Ever heard of the Golden Gloves? The Hudson River Dispatch runs it. Not everybody’s into boxing, especially people like me,” he allowed. “Jimmy was an aggressive guy. I was going through some papers and noticed he made corporal within six months—from private to PFC to corporal that quick. And corporal means you’re on the way up. This was a guy who made a talent of climbing the ladder. He made sergeant before he got blown up.”
I stared at the prayer card bearing my name. We didn’t speak about Uncle Jimmy around the house much. I knew he’d died at Iwo Jima in 1945 after volunteering on what was called a “suicide mission,” clearing mines from the beach in advance of an amphibious landing in the Volcano Islands. I also knew he was buried with a chest full of ribbons, but Dad felt I was now old enough to know exactly what each one meant. He wanted me to understand the significance of my name, to know the burden and honor it invested in me.
One of the documents was a commendation that accompanied Uncle Jimmy’s Bronze Star, marked with a V to signify combat; he had earned this by carrying his injured squad leader to safety through enemy fire in Saipan. Another letter explained the Presidential Unit Citation, for the seizure of Tinian in the Marianas Islands, “unchecked by either natural obstacles or hostile fire.”
Finally he pulled out a letter to my grandfather from the Secretary of the Navy on behalf of President Roosevelt, posthumously awarding my uncle the highest honor bestowed by the corps, the Navy Cross. As Dad began reading them to me, his eyes welled with tears. I had never seen my father cry before, and at first I mistook his tears for signs of a terrible grief. Only when I listened more closely did I realize that they were tears of pride.
Placed in charge of a mine removal detail, Sergeant McGreevey landed with his men against savage enemy resistance and immediately initiated mine removal operations in an effort to clear a path through the beach area for our assault tanks. Shortly thereafter, he and his squad were taken under a smashing mortar bombardment supplemented by raking machine-gun fire from strategically placed hostile weapons covering the mine field, with resulting casualties to all but two of his men. Aided by one of the two remaining Marines, Sergeant McGreevey evacuated all casualties who could be moved, and then returned to his task of removing mines. Working desperately, he consistently disregarded the blasting Japanese bombardment and, when the surviving members of his squad were killed by the merciless enemy gunfire, staunchly continued to probe and disarm the dangerous weapons alone. Although instantly killed by a shellburst as he cleared the last of the mines from the beach, Sergeant McGreevey had succeeded in fulfilling his vital mission despite the loss of his entire squad, and his unfailing skill, indomitable determination and valiant devotion to duty in the face of tremendous odds reflect the highest credit upon himself and the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country.
Dad looked at me. “My mother and father come off the boat from Ireland. Nothing could have made them prouder than to lose a son this way, defending freedom for their adopted homeland. He is an American hero.”
IN THE SUMMER BETWEEN THIRD AND FOURTH GRADES, I BEGAN feeling more comfortable with my peers. A handful of pals and I spent countless hours riding our bikes through the woods around our homes, building a vast city of forts and make-believe hospitals. There was a marshy pond back there, brimming with wildlife, and before long we turned our attention to the business of catching frogs. We’d take them home and watch them hop around all afternoon (or longer, though we soon discovered their shelf life was very short back in our rooms).
After a time, though, we lost interest in watching them hop—and for some inexplicable reason the boredom turned to cruelty. One hot day we brought our pet frogs down to the end of a block where we knew there was a surplus of tar left behind by the public works department. One of the boys had heard that if you put a frog in the tar, it would eventually dry up and then you could “pop” it by stepping on the dehydrated frog.
It was stupid, cruel, and immature; my stomach still turns to think about it. We all took
the frogs we had caught down to the “tar pits” and tossed them at the sticky trap. I can still see it now, watching the frogs jump once or twice before their webbed feet became stuck in the tar. Maybe they didn’t know fear; maybe it’s true that they don’t feel the gradual onslaught of pain. But I could see in their eyes, as these poor creatures baked in the hot summer sun, that they were reacting—that they wanted to get away. But the longer they stayed in one spot the deeper they sank.
Later that day we returned to the scene of the crime, and my pals set about crushing the dead animals under their heels. I don’t think I joined in the stomping party, that day or thereafter. But I did spend many days that summer gathering up the poor things and flinging them to their death in the tar.
Why do I include this story? To show that at some point in a boy’s childhood he may find himself in need of a wake-up call, a lesson to explain the value of life. For me this lesson came, indirectly and unexpectedly, through the Cub Scouts.
I loved everything about the Scouts—wearing the uniform, reciting the Oath, gathering merit badges. The safety badge, the family life badge, the woodworking badge: each presented a discrete challenge, a defined path for achievement, and a recognized reward. These for me were like practicums for my father’s adage, Plan your work and work your plan. I also very consciously thought of them as credentials: If I work hard enough, I thought, I can become a Webelo, then a Boy Scout, and beyond.
One day we learned that our kindhearted Scout leader had died of a sudden heart attack. As devastated as we were, the other boys and I created a vast and entertaining narrative around his passing. As part of a wicked power grab, we speculated, the assistant Scoutmaster must have failed to give the Scoutmaster mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at a critical moment, leaving him to die so that he could take over the top post. It was a horrible story, but we relished it—until the day of the wake. Dressed in our pressed uniforms and neckerchiefs, the assembled troop went to the Synowiecki Funeral Home in Carteret to pay our respects. Two by two, we approached the open casket, knelt, and said a prayer; I’m sure we all craned our necks for a glimpse of the corpse, but most of us were too short to see.
As I knelt beside the enormous wooden box, the Scoutmaster’s widow was suddenly overcome with grief. She cried out and lurched toward her husband with an awful sadness, scattering us Scouts as she folded the weight of her body around him. I had never seen such grief—a contagious sorrow that traveled through the pews—and the sound of the community’s sobs brought home to me, perhaps for the first time, the truth of death and a respect for life, for Scoutmasters and frogs alike.
OF ALL THE BOYS MY AGE, I WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO COMMIT THE entire Latin Mass to memory. I knew it cold, and not just by rote; I studied the Mass the way Plato studied Socrates. I sharpened my Latin vocabulary with daily drills. I mimicked the words as they flowed from Father Anthony’s mouth, singing where he sang, whispering where he whispered, practicing until I could generate a faultless replica of his own incantations as they spilled over the white marble altar. When I noticed that Father Lyons said Mass in a slightly different order than Father Anthony, I made a point of memorizing each priest’s unique interpretations. Even with all the other gaps in my memory, these details I still recall.
And my efforts paid off: at the age of nine I was invited to be an altar boy, among the youngest at St. Joe’s. The call came one morning in early winter, when the sun was still warm. Sister Mary Louis, a delightful Servite nun with a head cover tucked below her chin, approached me quietly. “Sister Imelda wishes to see you,” she said. This can’t be good, I thought. I went to her office directly and stood nervously in the reception area of the school’s administrative pod.
She looked up from her desk over the black rim of her glasses. Another nun stood behind her, regarding me cautiously. “Report to the church,” Sister Imelda said.
I wasn’t expecting to be handed an altar boy’s surplice that day, but when it happened I was overcome with pride. To be selected was a heady feeling. When I threaded myself into the floor-length robe and small white alb, I knew the promises of the Church were true: I was being summoned to serve as a kind of mini-Christ on Earth, and the realization was nearly too crushing to bear. In a dream I had not long thereafter, and again from time to time throughout my life, I saw myself facedown on the white marble rostrum, prostrate before God and the bishop towering above me, receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. Tu es sacerdos in aeternun, secundum ordinem Melchizedek, a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.
A priest forever: the idea has attracted me from time to time throughout my life. As a young man I paged through seminary brochures and daydreamed about becoming “a man chosen and set apart,” as Pope John XXIII wrote, “and blessed in a very special way with heavenly gifts—a sharer in divine power.” I ran my fingertips over the photographs of young students with books under their arms, the Church’s future leaders kicking at the hems of their cassocks, and dreamed of a life of spirit-driven purpose.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Back then, all I knew for sure was that I would make myself the perfect altar boy, bringing pride to my clan. I literally recall hearing that word sing in my mind: perfect. And, having attained this remarkable high office, I wasn’t the first altar boy to behave in a cocky way, though I may have set new standards for self-assurance. When the bishop of Trenton, George Ahr, came to say Mass at our church, I remember feeling obliged to welcome him myself. “Your Eminence,” I said, extending my small hand, “I’m Jimmy McGreevey, a fourth-grader, an altar boy—one of the youngest—and a member of [this club and that] at St. Joe’s. I extend a warm welcome on behalf of myself and the other students.” The bishop was gracious, and we spoke for a number of minutes before I realized that the entire congregation had turned to look at us. I could see my grandmother mouthing to my father, “Look at Jimmy, he’s talking to the bishop.” Most Catholics were intimidated by such visits from high Church leaders, as my father recalls. “We all treated the bishop like he was a visitor from Heaven. You didn’t care. You’d be talking to anybody and everybody.”
It’s no wonder my father used to call me “my little statesman.” From a very young age I saw myself as a leader, and when other kids were worrying about what to do with their summer vacations, I was already setting ridiculously outsized political goals for myself. I don’t remember this at all, but Jim Burns, who transferred to St. Joe’s from parochial school in Jersey City when we were both second- or third-graders, says I introduced myself to him on his first day as though I were the official ambassador to newcomers, adding: “I’m going to be secretary of state one day.” A few years later, I had the hubris to tell Mary DeLoretto, a gorgeous girl who palled around with me at the YMCA when we were teenagers, something similar: “One day I’m gonna marry you and be president of the United States.”
And yet, even back then, I knew on some semiconscious level that I could never be president—or even have a wife, not properly. I didn’t yet know that I was gay, but I had that desperate sense that I was alone and destined to remain that way. I saw myself as apart from the wider world, and I had the feeling that others out there were secretly spying on me. I saw them watching me, and I saw myself being watched by them. I wanted to exist in the simple moment like everybody else, where I felt myself closest to God and embraced by my family, but that proved impossible to sustain. Scholars have described the “growing sense of distance…loneliness, and despair” that often characterizes the youth and adolescence of gay men and women. I felt all that and more, and it made me afraid.
This feeling, commonly referred to as dissociation, is caused when a child pushes unwanted knowledge out of his mind. My gayness was an unsettling fact even before I learned the ugly vocabulary to describe it, even before it involved sexual impulses or the prolonged period of repression and explosion that inevitably follows.
Lon Johnston and David Jenkins, two Texas professors of social work, have studied the childhood psychic damage commo
nly found among gay men and women who come out in later life:
Adolescence is often known as a time of rebellion and self-discovery. Yet [for these subjects] acts of defiance and embracing their inner feelings were often curtailed during adolescence. Most participants indicated they rarely rebelled against their parents or other authority figures. Participants described intense pressure to guard the secret of their sexual orientation, and one way to guard this secret was to always be in control of their behavior. Being in control meant rarely doing anything that could raise questions in their parent(s)’ and/or friends’ minds about what might be going on inside the adolescent’s head…. During this time period, adolescents focus on two developmental tasks: ‘independence from the family and the development of personal identity.’ This study suggests that the development of a personal identity by gay men and lesbians during adolescence is impeded by internal conflicts regarding one’s sexual orientation.
I’m no social scientist, but I can assure you that this describes me perfectly. My entire personal identity was impeded during my childhood. My difference was a fact, not a theory, and it was something I could not overcome. I didn’t even know what homosexuality was; gayness has only been discussed politely for the past few decades, and when I was growing up the idea made only brief appearances, mostly in the punch lines of jokes. I never heard my mom or dad, or anyone else in our large family, utter a single negative word about gays—but then again, the subject never really came up at all, good or bad. In our world, homosexuality really didn’t exist.
There were glimpses on television: Paul Lynde, Liberace, and Rip Taylor come to mind, and later Truman Capote and Renée Richards, the transgender tennis player. But for the most part these were presented as “characters,” outsized personalities, never explicitly acknowledged as gay. The figures themselves were as anxious as anyone to keep the subject out of public view; Liberace even took a journalist to court for calling him a “fruit flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love” (and he won!).
The Confession Page 4