The Confession (2 page)

But those of us who come to embrace our true identities later in life have a unique need to revisit our divided pasts in order to mend our hearts and face our lives to come. So carefully, candidly, and with great hope, I rewind the cinema of myself for one more viewing, this time without shame.

PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY DAY IN HISTORY, AUGUST 6 IS ASSOCIATED
with fireballs and light: it is the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, which claimed tens of thousands of lives but may have saved even more by ending the war, and the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, marking that moment when the face of Jesus “did shine as the sun and his garments became white as snow,” transmitting the interior brightness of his divinity. To my father, a fervent Catholic who twice enlisted in the marines, these were great omens for the birthday of his first child and only son, in 1957. He named me James Edward McGreevey after his older brother, an amateur boxing star, World War II hero, and Navy Cross and Bronze Star recipient who fell on the shores of Iwo Jima when he was just nineteen—a great patriot and Dad's lifelong idol.

My two sisters and I—Caroline came a year later and Sharon in 1962—were second-generation Americans, like just about everybody in the insular Roman Catholic universe of our childhoods. We lived first in Jersey City, a community of new Americans from Romania, Poland, Italy, Greece, and especially Ireland, our own ancestral home. As different as these populations were from one another, we all had the Roman Catholic Church in common, whether it was Our Lady of Czestochowa Church on Sussex Street or St. Aedans on Bergen or St. Paul of the Cross on Hancock. The parish you came from was the center of your culture and source of your pride, and the seat of all power in your life. If you wanted a job or a raise, ran into trouble with the authorities, had disputes at home or school, you turned to your parish priest, who was as much in charge of your daily well-being as of your
spiritual health. He was politician, therapist, employment broker, matchmaker, judge, and jury, and his authority was unchallenged within the parish.

When I was almost five we moved a few minutes away to the new working-class suburb of Carteret, still just eighteen miles from Ellis Island, where our grandparents on both sides first touched American soil. Having come this far across the Atlantic, the McGreeveys and my mother's family, the Smiths, weren't about to pull up roots again.

My father's family was in law enforcement, a longtime haven for Irish Americans. Looking at the old pictures of the Jersey City Police, I'm still awed at how strong a lock the Irish had on the force: Flahertys, Cahills, Geoghans—all unsmiling Irishmen with square jaws and boxer's noses. On Sundays it wasn't unusual to see whole precincts show up for communion en masse, pistols at their sides.

After serving in World War I, my grandfather Mike went to the monsignor at All Saints parish on Pacific Avenue for help finding work. All the monsignor had to do was tell City Hall, “I'm sending Mike McGreevey up to see you.” Next thing you knew, Mike did very well on the police department test. This was the legendary power of the turned-around collar, and Mike never forgot it. Landing the job made my grandfather one of the fortunate men in his community, and his luck continued throughout his career walking a beat in the old 4th Precinct along Communipaw Avenue.

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, forthright, 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 C
ONVERT
L
EADS
H
OLY
N
AME
P
ARADE
.

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.