The Confession (3 page)

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.

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 born 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.

When my grandmother was discharged, she came to live with us; twice daily my mom guided her through physical therapy, not always with Grandma's eager consent. But soon she was strong enough to move to a small apartment over my aunt and uncle's home in Rutherford, where she lived on for many years. When she died, her whole family gathered around her bed in prayer. My mother leaned into her ear and whispered, “It's okay to let go. Daddy is waiting for you to come home.”

Then Grandma's mouth opened and the life in her escaped.

A few minutes later, I was startled to see my mother calmly dialing the local health department to notify them of Grandma's passing. I was still dazed, unable to do anything, even cry.

Seeing my distress, my mother comforted me in the way she knew best. “Here,” she said, taking my hand and cupping it under my grandmother's chin. Together we eased her mouth closed. “Her jaw will lock soon, and we don't want it to be open when that happens. Hold it right here, like this; that will help keep Grandma's mouth closed, as it should be.” To this day I'm not sure if what she told me was true or a distraction. But I did as I was told, and as a chaos of grief filled the room, I focused all my attention on my grandmother's cooling chin and her beautiful face, and in time my own heartache became manageable.

“ONE LIVES BY MEMORY…AND NOT BY TRUTH,” IGOR STRAVINSKY
wrote. In my case, I have lived by neither. My memories of my early years are curiously spotty. Specifics, like the names and faces of friends or teachers—even of close relatives—sometimes seem to float around in my mind in a useless muddle, blurry and disconnected. Dates, simple anecdotes, the ephemera of a child's life are all upturned and broken, as if attacked by a vandal. It is really remarkable what I don't know or can't be certain of. Until this book was nearly finished, I had always believed that all three of my grandmothers were named Mary. My father had to remind me that his biological mother, whom I never met, was named Margaret. Long reminiscences about her life may have filled our dinner conversation, but the details have all melted away.

What color was our house? I couldn't say. What did my father tell me about his time in the service? Nothing comes to mind—really, nothing. I think back now and wonder if it was the anniversary of Nagasaki, not Hiroshima, that coincided with my birth. I should know this; we even used it in campaign materials. “James E. McGreevey was born on the anniversary of…” Nothing.

In place of hard facts are sharply detailed feelings: moments of elation and pride; large doses of hope; ultimately discouragement, pain, and a soul-racking fear.

More than anything else I recall being, or trying very deliberately to be, a perfect child. Not a Goody Two-shoes, but a kid who did good, who worked hard and met every expectation. I strove to achieve in the excessive
way that psychotherapists tend to regard with concern. My drive was unrelenting. I know I overreacted to the expectations my teachers and parents had for me. But while other kids might have considered them goals to strive for, to me they were marching orders. It never occurred to me to ignore them. Whether I was motivated by some sort of religious duress or the pressures of the firstborn son, I can't say. But I approached the small tests of a young boy's life with the anxiety of a rookie pitcher at the World Series. My future rode on every single move.

To put it another way, I had an almost electrifying feeling of being observed. I suppose this is not unusual for a Catholic of my generation. We were raised to believe that God kept unsparing records on every one of us, each new entry composed in permanent ink. Before God, my life and heart were an open book.

I do know that I was a good reader, from the time I was very young. Besides poring over the Elizabethan histories my grandfather shared with me, I remember as a youngster reading about Greece and Rome with my dad, as well as the wartime biographies he loved—MacArthur and Churchill, Patton and Eisenhower. The other kids made fun of me for lugging around these weighty books in grammar school, but I loved them, and cherished the time my father and I spent together reading them. Where my mother was training her children to be curious scholars, I later realized, Dad was schooling us to be leaders. He took an extraordinary interest in my progress in school and church, my interaction with adults and other children, my overall social development. For my ninth birthday, I believe it was, and every year thereafter, he addressed my card this way: “To my lad of great expectations.” The words were almost unnecessary; I knew just how high those expectations were. I also felt sure they were not misplaced.

I'm sure he also encouraged my two sisters, but not in quite the same way. They grew up to be very accomplished women—Sharon's a principal and Caroline became a nurse. But he invested a different kind of attention in me; he drove me harder.

Once I was out in the world, I faced my first real-world challenge: getting Virginia Jones, my kindergarten teacher, to like me. I won her over handily. I remember feeling pride in my quick mastery of alphabet and
vocabulary, and I believe I also courted her attentions with polish and politeness. But beyond that I recall little; the year has slid, as Maya Angelou once wrote of her own experience, “into the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood.”

Mrs. Jones was the only African American on faculty at Pvt. Nicholas Minue Elementary School in Carteret, and in all these years she has never failed to send a holiday card, addressed in her magnificent calligraphy. Today she is in a nursing home, where I write to her regularly. When I asked her to help me remember our year together, the first thing that came to her mind was my fastidious presentation. “You were always dressed so neatly,” she said. “The shirt, the tie, the trousers; your hair was combed nicely. I used to think to myself: There's a future president or something.” In truth, future presidents haven't always stood out for sartorial splendor in kindergarten; Bill Clinton admits in his memoir that he avoided wearing crisp new outfits because they drew attention to his unwanted girth, and Jimmy Carter, child of the Depression, was lucky to show up in overalls, one dollar a pair. By contrast, I never appeared in school without a necktie, and seldom without a jacket.

My kindergarten class was in a public school. After that, I attended only Catholic schools, where uniforms were required. Earning the admiration of the nuns and priests at St. Joseph's Grammar School was my main objective. I was never teachers' pet—I wasn't the sort of kid who would tattle on other kids. Nor was I ever the top grade-getter. But I can say without hesitation that I was the hardest working child at St. Joe's. I was the kind of kid who loved Monday mornings, racing to school and working diligently to prove myself to the nuns and priests with quick answers and rapt attention.

By far the most difficult challenges there were our two principals, Sister Imelda and, later, Sister Eugene, a Servants of Mary nun who changed her name to Sister Patricia after Vatican II allowed such liberties; eventually we even got to see her hair. But in 1963 the sisters still dressed the same way they had in the thirteenth century, in flowing habits with floor-length robes and veil and collar wimples that pinched their faces into swollen expressions of discomfort. Sister Imelda, my principal until the fifth grade, was an omnipotent figure. She moved through the polished
halls soundlessly and without sign of effort, as though propelled on muffled skates. Sister Eugene was the fearsome nun of legend. Without warning, a stealthy hand could shoot from her sleeve and pin any boy against the lockers, his feet dangling off the floor. She was nearly indiscriminate in her disciplinary zeal. The slightest provocation would call her to action. But she never once turned her attentions to me. In these eight years at St. Joe's, that was my major accomplishment.

 

THE CHURCH AND HER DESIGNATES WERE AN IMPORTANT FEATURE
of my childhood. I am blessed to know only honorable and decent clergy, not the embittered nuns or child-abusing pastors of the sort who fill newspaper articles and fuel lawsuits these days. I believe my excellent experience is shared by all my relatives, going back many generations and continuing through the present. I do not think we were simply lucky. I believe the overwhelming majority of men and women who heed the Lord's call are exceptional human beings.

Outside of school we had little interaction with the nuns, who seemed to disappear back into the convent as soon as the last child had mounted his bicycle and left for home. Their secret lives were a cause of great fascination for us. Over the years, as Vatican II progressed, we watched with astonishment as they hemmed the black robes of their habits, lifting them to show their ankles and later their knees; then one day their transformation was complete, and they appeared uncomfortably before us in secular clothing and mannish hairdos. We never knew how this affected their spiritual lives, but it could not have been any less jarring for them than it was for us. Those stiff cornettes must have been uncomfortable to wear, but they symbolized the nuns' sacred purpose, and to me at least they were the most glamorous of fashion statements.

If our nuns were inscrutable, our priests were omnipresent. You couldn't ride your bike down Roosevelt Avenue in Carteret without spotting one of them going about his daily ministrations. Priests, especially old Father Patrick Lyons, were regular visitors to our home, occasionally at mealtime. Father Lyons was a man of great humility and, to me, the model of
decency. He believed that children should be taught to pray, just as they should be taught to read, and he gave us the skills to discover our faith. “Don't pray to God only when you need something,” he told me. “Tell God you love him. Talk to him the way you talk to your best friend. Share your life with God, and he'll share his grace with you in return.”

When Father Lyons was nearing the end of his life, he asked my sister Sharon to pray for him so that when he died and arrived in purgatory, her prayers would form a basket that would lift him to Heaven. “And when I reach Heaven,” he promised, “I will then pray for you and begin to weave a basket that will be waiting for you in purgatory.”

The Dolans were among our most prominent family friends in Jersey City, and they had two priests in the family: Father Charles and Father James. When they visited we would discuss everything from the state of the world to Mrs. So-and-So's many illnesses; after dinner, if he was in the mood, Father James would linger in the living room singing “Danny Boy” and “This House” well into the evening. What a talented man he was. In Carteret there was a saying: “The three major occupations for Irishmen are the priesthood, politics, and poetry.” Father James practiced them all.

In matters of the Church, I wanted to succeed. I was determined to demonstrate to Father Anthony Gaydos, our stocky parish priest, that I deserved his support and recognition. I wanted him to recognize that my performance was not just conscientious but downright godly. That was the highest measure of significance in our world:
godliness.
There was an old Irish maxim we heard a lot as children, lifted from the hymn called “St. Patrick's Breastplate”: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” Everything you do, in other words, should be Christ-centered; that's how we were expected to behave, and that's what I believed, as I still do today.

I prayed every day as instructed, anxious to be the best Catholic I could be. I wanted the priests to understand my fealty to the Church, my knowledge of doctrine, and my willingness to be a soldier for Christ. Consciously
and deliberately, I tailored my actions in ways I knew would meet the approval of the priests, the pastor, and the nuns—a policy that, you can imagine, didn't exactly endear me to some of my peers. I was not popular with the other kids. In church and school, they tended to leave me alone. I never doubted why. From the time I was seven, I had a sense of myself as being different. No matter how much I tried, I just didn't fit in. Even before I had any words to describe it, I remember concluding that there was something about what I
was,
not just about what I was
doing,
that set me permanently apart.

My faith, and the encouragement I received from church leaders, held me together through this realization. Yet there was a time in my early youth when I confessed to being very confused about who this God was. I recall studying the Baltimore Catechism with Sister Anthony—this is a crisp memory—and discovering that the more I studied it the more confused I became. The Baltimore Catechism, which has since been dropped, was an extremely technical and doctrinaire introduction to Catholicism, required reading for all young American Catholics since 1885. In question-and-answer format, it spelled out the teachings of the Church, from “What befell Adam and Eve because of their sin?” to “How should we keep the holy days of obligation?”

But I found it maddeningly elliptical. Consider this passage:

“Sister Anthony,” I finally admitted, “I've read and prayed on it, but I'm having trouble figuring out who God is, how to picture him. And if I can't picture him, I can't know him—can't know who I'm praying to.”

The sister was kind. “God,” she said, “is love.” It was the first time I had heard that straightforward description. “You can't see your mother's love, but you know it's there, don't you?” I nodded. “You know it's there because you can feel it, isn't that right?” It was. “Same thing with God. You
feel
His presence. That's your knowledge.”

As a youth, I could indeed feel God all around me, in the lives of my parents and grandparents, especially my maternal grandmother. And I felt it most when I was able to be present in the moment, sitting quietly in our backyard or basking in the ordinary banter that filled our home. Later I would lose track of this sensation, and with it my relationship to God—especially once I entered politics. But at least back then, I felt a unifying purpose and mission through the Church. I found God in all things, as St. Ignatius Loyola suggested, and this gave me great strength and comfort.

 

THE DAY OF MY FIRST CONFESSION, I PUT ON A PAIR OF CHARCOAL
gray slacks, a white short-sleeved shirt, and a green tartan clip-on tie. I felt as though I stood just this side of adulthood. It was a somber milestone. Confession is the first sacrament we got to participate in fully. We had our own lines to say, some in Latin, and for months the Sisters had schooled us in our perfect recitations.