The Confession by James E. McGreevey Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Â 
    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 indivine 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,