Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (5 page)

In Portugal, I had first felt this inchoate hunger for rights and freedoms, but I was so young that it was a hunger I hardly noticed and didn’t even think to name. But here, in my new country, that desire for freedom
was
named, and the historic moment—satisfied by revolution—was commemorated and celebrated. In recognizing this American passion, I simultaneously recognized something in myself. So a connection between me and my new country was somehow strengthening.

Gerald Ford was president when I came here, then Jimmy Carter. My brothers said I was a bookworm, and I was. I read biographies and history. I read everything I could find about the Kennedys and about Eleanor Roosevelt. Then there was the Iran hostage crisis, which led to the program
Nightline
, to which I became quickly addicted. But what I was really becoming addicted to—and now, at last, aware of being addicted to—was America and the idea of being an American in a way that’s perhaps impossible to understand for someone who is born here. I found it thrilling—that is truly the word—that Americans could effect change in their country and in the whole world just by virtue of whom they voted for.

In high school I joined the Civics Club and the History Club, and I took part in voter-registration drives, even though I wasn’t an American citizen myself because I wasn’t yet eighteen. So I bided my time until I turned eighteen, and then, as soon as I could, I filed the paperwork to become a citizen. I made sure my parents did too. One spring day in 1985, I received a notice informing me that my citizenship exam was scheduled for the following week at the federal building on Walnut Street in Newark. Even though I’d been helping people to become citizens for years and knew the answers to any of the hundred questions the examiner might ask, I studied the night before.

The following week, at the appointed time, I showed up, accompanied by my father, who was taking his test that day too. We sat in the waiting room until we were called, not speaking much. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father wipe his palms on his trouser legs. After about an hour, the examiner, a tired-looking man in his fifties wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, called my name. When I stood up, he waved me into his office.

“You can sit right here,” he said, gesturing at a chair near his desk. Then he asked his first question. “What do the stars and stripes on the flag stand for?”

“The fifty states and the thirteen colonies,” I said promptly.

“What is the Bill of Rights?”

“The basic rights accorded to all citizens.”

“What is a progressive tax?”

I froze. “A
what
!?” I looked at him blankly. “That’s not one of the questions. I don’t remember seeing that—”

“Only kidding,” he said. “You passed. I don’t need to ask you any more questions.”

My father was called next, and he passed too. Within days we were summoned to the federal courthouse, where we were sworn in. Now that I was a citizen, I could never be thrown out of the country, and I could get an American passport, and I could vote. I could even run for some elected offices if I wanted to.

It was during this period that I became one of the founding members of the Portuguese-American Congress (PAC). I saw that the Portuguese community in Newark got the short end of the stick—a prison in our backyard, an attempt to turn half of our park into a baseball field, an incinerator in our neighborhood—because as a group we didn’t vote in large numbers. I understood that the only way we Portuguese could make ourselves felt was through voting, so PAC had as its central mission getting the community registered to vote. Of course you had to be a citizen in order to vote, and so, where necessary, PAC helped people get their citizenship.

In 1984, like many Portuguese families who’ve been here for a while, we moved out of Newark—to nearby Elizabeth—where I would live with my parents until I married Jim in October 2000.

By this time I had graduated from East Side High School, where I’d done well, finishing in the top 20 in a class of 460. I had applied to several colleges, including New York University, and I was accepted by all of them, but I wanted to go where many of my friends were going, which was to the Newark campus of Rutgers University. Most of my other friends were going to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, nearby.

College was a smorgasbord, and I loved a lot of what I was sampling: architecture, even though I couldn’t draw; anything having to do with law;
The Great Gatsby;
psychology; Karl Marx, even though I thought he was a bit far out; Margaret Mead. In the end, I became a political science major with a psychology minor. I also pushed—unsuccessfully, but I pushed—to get a Portuguese Studies major going, so our faces would be represented in the required curriculum along with other ethnic faces. I was active enough that the biweekly Portuguese-American newspaper
Luso Americano
seemed to mention my name regularly. I primarily stayed involved in Newark, although I also became politically active in Elizabeth, where I now lived.

Somehow, by the time I was twenty-two, I came to the attention of Elizabeth’s mayor, Tom Dunn, who asked me if I was willing to be appointed to the Elizabeth Planning Board, whose mandate was to approve residential and commercial building projects, landscaping, and so on. I said yes. I was the only board member who wasn’t male or over seventy.

The day I walked into city hall to attend my first meeting, there was Ray Lesniak, later Jim’s mentor, standing at the door. I knew him by reputation. Everybody did. He was Elizabeth’s state senator, but he was also known as the go-to guy. Now he’s become a national power broker—a strong fund-raiser for people such as Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, both of whom made pilgrimages to his house to attend his fund-raisers on their behalf and to pay their respects. He was a local lawyer who was then about forty, a man who ate, drank, and slept politics. No other life, so far as anyone knew. No wife, no children, and a succession of much-younger gorgeous blond companions. If you wanted to secure a state or government contract or run for office, he was the one whose blessing you’d have to get. Eventually, he was not only Jim’s mentor, but arguably the most important member of his inner circle.

Lesniak and Tom Dunn, who had appointed me, were feuding, and I knew it. That first day, Ray was standing on the front steps of city hall where the meeting would be held. As I walked toward the entrance, he said, “Oh, you must be Dina Matos.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m Senator Lesniak,” he said.

I knew who he was. “Nice to meet you,” I said. But it wasn’t nice to meet him. The manner in which he greeted me was unfriendly. He knew I was Dunn’s appointee, and he struck as intimidating a tone as he could. Perhaps he suspected that Dunn had appointed me to the planning board because he had something else in mind for me. And if Lesniak suspected that, he was right. Eight or nine months later, I got a call from the mayor’s secretary. “Mayor Dunn wants to see you tomorrow,” she said.

I thought maybe I’d done something wrong, but the next day when I went to see the mayor, he sat me down and got to the point right away. “Have you ever thought of running for office?”

“Maybe at some point—”

“How about now?”

He wanted me to run for county surrogate on his slate. I was a woman, I was Portuguese, and there was a growing Portuguese population in Elizabeth. With my last name—Matos—he thought I could get the Hispanic vote as well.

In the end I decided not to run. I was flattered, yes, and I considered it for about twenty-four hours, but in the end I chose not to pursue it. The person I would have been running against in the Democratic primary had been in the position for several years and was quite popular. Second, she had the “official” Democratic organization behind her—Lesniak and company. So I knew she would win the primary no matter whom she ran against, and she would certainly win running against a complete unknown like me. If I was going to run for office, I didn’t mind losing, but I at least wanted to lose respectably—by 10 to 20 percent. I didn’t want it to be a rout.

BY 1995, I HAD
traveled an enormous distance from the city of my birth, and my journey had been determined, as it is in most lives, by both choice and necessity. Though I’d always intended to finish college, my life in the years that ensued had become quite full. I was now very active in local politics, with a powerful urge to help, especially children, and especially children with health problems. I had also discovered by then that state and local politics didn’t work at all the way I had learned they did in my political science classes at Rutgers, but I found that I could nudge change along anyhow by joining forces with people who believed as I did.

Political action was a passion, and the public arena was an intimate space. So when Jim McGreevey walked into my life one night, he was the other half of the orange. Some women are drawn to politicians because of their wealth, power, and influence. It wasn’t that. When I met Jim, he wasn’t wealthy, he wasn’t powerful (except as a town mayor), and he wasn’t—yet—all that influential. But his values and his passions as he lived them in public were, in light of my experiences, right up there with love potions. We didn’t have much of a private life when we met, or later on either. Of course it’s clear now that Jim was avoiding a private life, but it wasn’t clear then. Still, as a state senator Jim had sponsored legislation to fund centers where kids with special mental or physical needs could get the care they could not possibly get at home. One night later on, when we were out campaigning, some mothers thanked him for what he’d done for their children. As mayor, he had also helped open and fund a medical clinic in a small town called Paraíso in the Dominican Republic. I didn’t need much more than that.

3. FIRST ENCOUNTER

WHEN I THINK OF
all that happened during the eight years of my relationship with Jim McGreevey, the beginning—how I met him, how I fell in love with him—is the hardest story to tell, or at least to tell in the right way. When love goes out the door, courtship stories may go into the attic, never to be told again. It’s no fun to recount the birth of a love that died a horrible death. My sadness and, yes, my anger, cast long shadows and obscure much that was hopeful and happy. But if I don’t tell this story carefully, Jim will look like someone you wouldn’t trust to feed your cat over the weekend, much less someone who was the repository of so much trust, public and private. And if that’s the man who emerges, what does that say about my judgment in marrying him?

Jim was devastated when his wife left him without any warning, and therefore he came to doubt his ability to read the emotions of someone he loved. Ironically, he put me in the same position, so that now, because I failed to read him, I’ve come to question my own ability to read anyone I might love. It was my own extreme sense of privacy that kept me from asking questions I would have considered intrusive if anyone had asked them of me. I know that now. And I know that it was my tendency toward privacy (not to mention my steadfast loyalty) that allowed Jim to keep secrets from me and ultimately led to a marriage in so many ways counterfeit. Also ironically, the person I was most suspicious of was Jim’s first wife, Kari. That was a tragic red herring. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jim and I first met in October 1995 at the Armory, a Perth Amboy restaurant. The dinner was in honor of a Pretender. The irony isn’t lost on me. Jim, as both a state senator and the mayor of Woodbridge, was a guest of honor, but the real Pretender, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron, was the Duke of Braganza, heir to the Portuguese throne, who was honored annually by a local Portuguese-American organization. This year the dinner was being held in Perth Amboy, a town near Woodbridge.

I noticed Jim when he came in. I didn’t know who he was, but I thought he was handsome in a Tom Hanks kind of way, despite his old-fashioned barbershop haircut. He had a wide, easy smile and exuded a kind of warmth that seemed to extend to each person in the small group he was talking to. It was early in the evening, and things were just getting started when Manny Viegas, a friend who took an avuncular interest in me, came over.

“I want you to meet someone,” he said. “Come with me.”

Manny, like me, was an officer in the Portuguese-American Congress. He and his wife, Grace, lived in Woodbridge and had invited Jim to the event. Manny was a kind man who had been happily married for many years and had two children my age. He knew a lot of people in the community and wasn’t shy about putting them together, so I was pretty sure that his “someone” was a guy he was trying to fix me up with.

“Meet someone? I don’t think so, Manny,” I said. “Not tonight.” It was a festive evening, and I was dressed for it, but I really wasn’t in the mood to be fixed up.

“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “See that good-looking guy with all the women around him?” He gestured in Jim’s direction.

“I see him,” I said. “Who is he?”

“Jim McGreevey, the mayor of Woodbridge.”

I knew Jim McGreevey by name and reputation. I’d heard he was an ambitious politician on the fast track to somewhere interesting. I’d also heard he was charming and good-looking. When I saw him that day, I had to agree. I remembered that a guy I’d dated while at Rutgers—a poli sci major named Frank—had told me about Jim. Frank and I had gone our separate ways years earlier, but because we were both active in local Portuguese-American political circles, our paths often crossed. Frank was working for Senator Frank Lautenberg at the time. Jim, in pursuit of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, had consulted with various high-level politicians, including Lautenberg, and Frank had been very impressed with him. “You have to meet this guy,” he said. “He’s smart. He’s going places.”

Meanwhile Manny, his hand at my back, was piloting me toward Jim.

“Jim,” he said, “there’s someone I want you to meet.”

He introduced us, and Jim gave me a friendly smile.