The Confession (4 page)

This was a day of wild anxiety for me—for all of us, I think. We were all seven years old; it was a good bet that none of us had yet committed a mortal sin. Not going to church on Sunday was the only one that loomed over our heads, and I personally knew not one kid in the second grade who had ever missed a Sunday Mass. That left us to plumb the venial sins, our misdemeanors. I gave my conscience a strict and thoroughgoing review, but in the
end all I had was a list of minor behavioral infractions and a handful of unworthy thoughts. But frankly, I had no idea how many were genuine sins.

The Sisters had been specific in their trainings. This would be a time of transformation for us. Inside that musty enclosure, speaking anonymously to an unseen voice as though to God himself, we would have our first opportunity to become sinless again, to wipe our slates clean. But there were many rules. Be succinct, they'd said. Don't go into a lot of detail.
Don't
bother the priest with frivolous things. And don't name others who sinned with you—this is not a court of law, but a personal reckoning with God.

In addition to those protocols, I understood confession to involve a complex moral appraisal of our actions. Stealing food is surely sinful, but if I stole out of hunger my culpability was mitigated. Did I know the food wasn't mine to take?
Should
I have known it belonged to someone else? On top of this was the matter of intentionality—a kind of eye-of-the-beholder clause I had a hard time wrapping my mind around. Of course I had never stolen a thing in my life, but it didn't matter. Wading through the moral forest of my soul, I found myself hopelessly obsessed with the trees.

I consulted my parents, whose advice for the big day was simple:
be rigorous.
Needing more practical pointers, I turned to Walter Lambert, a classmate with a knack for managing tricky situations. One day, Walter had tried showing me a way to make your arm numb by rubbing it with a ruler. We sat in the back of geography class scraping rulers up and down our arms, as though we were sharpening a knife without a leather strap. It hurt like hell; numbness would have been a
gift.
But Sister Imelda caught us before the experiment bore fruit. For whatever reason, she snatched up Walter and left me behind. When he returned, the numb part was between him and his chair. He never once wondered aloud why I'd been spared. I think he knew his culpability was greater than mine, and accepted his penance with contrition.

“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.

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.