Fueling my desire was Mrs. Selahowski’s obsession with having the deepest tan in all of Michigan. Every single day, beginning in late spring, she would be out in her backyard, stretched on a chaise longue worshipping the sun. She would bake out there for hours in a tiny two-piece bathing suit, her blond hair piled loosely atop her head, rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses shading her eyes, baby oil slathered over her golden body. When she would lie on her stomach, she often reached back and unfastened her bathing suit top, which I found wildly provocative. One false move, and her bosom—I pronounced the word ba-zooms—would be fully exposed. From my second-story bedroom window, I had the perfect vantage point, and I prayed fervently for the lawn sprinklers to come on and shock her onto her feet. For my birthday, I asked for a telescope. “Our little Galileo,” I heard Mom tell Dad.
A schoolboy crush would have been one thing, but by the time second grade had rolled around I had clearly moved into the sinful land of lust. I was coveting my neighbor’s wife—poor Mr. Selahowski, he was such a nice man—and wife coveting was on the list not just of mortal sins but of grave mortal sins. That alone made me terrified of the confessional and the wrath I knew awaited me. But it got worse.
Sister Mary Lawrence was my second-grade teacher. She was stern and no-nonsense, a tiny woman who, as best as I could tell, was barely into her twenties. She wore the somber brown, scratchy wool habit of her order. A veil covered her hair, and stiffly starched linen boxed in her forehead, ears, and neck so that only
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the center of her face showed. Obviously she was no Mrs. Selahowski, but still kind of pretty. At least what I could see of her.
One day I was sitting in class lost in my thoughts, gazing at Sister in front of the chalkboard as she called on various students to stand and read aloud. The floor-length brown robes fascinated me, and I couldn’t help wondering what she wore under them.
Did she wear a bra and girdle like Mom? Or more of a flowing white nightgown getup like Florence Nightingale? Or frilly pet-ticoats like Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke? Pretty soon, without meaning to, I was undressing her. Not to be dirty, but just to see what was underneath. I pictured her alone in her room at the convent, tired at the end of the day, pulling off her veil, her hair tumbling down, then slipping out of the habit, letting it drop to the floor. Sure enough, underneath was a flowing white gown that at once managed to be both impossibly modest and revealing. From there, it was just a small hop on the Mortal Sin Express to get her out of her undergarments. I was lost in the moment, totally enjoying Sister’s nakedness, the droning voices of my classmates miles away.
That’s when I heard my name.
My eyes moved from Sister’s milky, naked torso to her face.
She was fully clothed again, her face sandwiched between the mortarboards, and she was staring right at me.
“Well?” she asked. “Come on now. We haven’t got all day.”
“Uh,” I responded.
“Begin where Michael left off.”
I knew the drill. I was to stand beside my desk and read in a loud clear voice from my Catholic Reader until Sister said, “Thank you, take your seat.” The only problem was, at that exact moment I happened to be sporting a full-blown, raging, miniature . . . situation. I still was not sure what to call that thing that sometimes visited when I least expected it. I looked down at my lap and my navy-blue uniform pants were poking up like a pup tent. I still believed in the literal power of prayer then, and I pulled out every big
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gun I could think of. Please, dear Jesus, dear God the Father, dear Holy Spirit, please make it go away. The tent pole held its ground.
All the angels and saints in heaven, please. Please! Don’t make me stand up. Dear Blessed Mother, make her call someone else.
“Uhhh,” I said. I was stalling for time. Please, Saint Christo-pher, Saint Francis, Saint Joseph the Carpenter.
“Mr. Grogan, we are all waiting.”
I lifted my book off my desk and fidgeted with the pages, pretending to find my place. Dear Saints Peter and Paul, Saint Matthew, Saint Monica, please, please. All the poor souls in purgatory. Help!
“Now, Mr. Grogan,” Sister said in a voice that told me there would be no more stalling.
I took a deep breath and stood up, giving a sort of salute as I did. In an ill-conceived attempt to hide the evidence, I held the book as low as I could, my arms fully extended at belt level. But this served only to highlight my predicament. It looked like I was using the bulge in my trousers as a book rest. A couple of kids began to giggle. I soldiered on. “Soon they saw an animal jump out of the snow,” I read aloud. “It was a gray rabbit. Hop hop, it went to the big tree.” I held the book away from me to steal a glance at my crotch. Still standing tall. I searched my brain for anyone who might rescue me from this humiliation. Please, dear Saint Aloysius. Saint John the Baptist. Saint Thomas? Please, saint . . .
saint . . . Saint Someone. Saint Anyone! Make it go away.
Then I remembered Sainte Anne de Beaupré. Of course!
Sainte Anne! My old friend! Surely she would remember me from my pilgrimage. The Stations of the Cross, the holy water, all those stairs I climbed on my knees. Mom had said that if I asked, she would hear me. Besides, malfunctioning body parts were her specialty. Dear Sainte Anne, please fix this. Fix it now. Fix it like you fixed all those broken people. Please, Sainte Anne, if you can make cripples walk and blind men see, I know you can make this thing go away.
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Not even she could help. “Soon an old mother rabbit and five baby rabbits came to eat,” I read. More kids snickered. If Sister noticed my aroused state, she gave no sign. Finally she released me from my torture. “Take your seat, please,” she said and called the next student. I sat, and when I looked down, it was gone.
In the weeks that followed, Sister continued to drill us about our sins and how we were to confess them. Over and over again we reviewed the protocol—pulling back the curtain and walking into the dark box, kneeling in front of the screen and waiting for Father to open the little door between us. Then we were to begin, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned . . .” Boy, had I ever.
I had fantasized the most salacious thoughts imaginable. I had coveted not only Mr. Selahowski’s wife, but Jesus’ wife, too. We were taught the nuns were the brides of Christ, and they wore the wedding bands to prove it. I had gazed upon a dedicated servant of the Church, wife of Jesus, and stripped her bare with my eyes. I was in serious trouble. I steeled myself to tell the truth.
As Sister had made clear, the worst sin of all would be to lie in the confessional because you would really be lying to God, and no one got away with that. I approached First Confession with all the joy of a condemned inmate making that last lonely walk to the gallows.
Our Lady of Refuge was a young parish, being built in phases.
There were three buildings: a large, ominous brick convent where the nuns lived, a friendlier-looking rectory where the priests lived, and the school, serving first through eighth grades. The real church was still years off, eventually to be built on the soccer field. In the meantime, church was held in that part of the school designed to become the gymnasium. It was an austere cinder-block structure with industrial glass-block windows and a linoleum floor. In front was a rudimentary sanctuary, still in cinder block but with thick red carpeting to give it a regal air, and a
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marble altar bedecked in starched linens beneath a towering crucifix. Separating the sanctuary from the pews was a varnished oak railing fitted with red-velvet kneelers where the faithful lined up to receive Jesus’ body and, on special occasions, a sip of his blood, too. Our house of worship was to the great cathedrals of Europe, and even to the just mildly magnificent churches of America, what a White Castle is to Morton’s steak house. But to me it was grand, mysterious, and enticing beyond words, perme
-ated with the smells of incense and beeswax.
This gym-turned-house-of-worship was where my first confession would take place. The church had a confessional built into each of the four corners, wired with red and green lights activated by weight-sensitive switches on the kneeler inside to let you know if it was empty or occupied by a confessing sinner.
Because we had seventy children in the two second-grade classes, plus the public-school kids from the parish, the pastor had asked priests from the Catholic seminary across the road to help out.
Four showed up to help Father handle about a hundred kids.
Every one of the priests had been to our house for dinner; every one of them knew me by name. To accommodate the fifth priest, a portable confessional was set up in a cloakroom off the vestibule.
It was basically a folding divider with a grate to speak through, a kneeler on one side for the penitent and a chair on the other for the priest. The children were divided into five groups and assigned confessionals. I was in the group assigned to the portable unit. No problem. Through the open door of the cloakroom, I could see it was just as private as the permanent booths. Unless Father recognized my voice, he would never guess that the sex-crazed nun coveter on the other side of the screen was actually the son of Ruth and Richard Grogan, loyal and devout parishioners and two of his most energetic volunteers.
I was about twelfth in line. Each child ahead of me walked into the cloakroom, closed the door behind him, and emerged a few minutes later with a penance to say. As I waited my turn, I
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practiced my lines. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession. Breakfast roiled in my stomach. How could I admit what I had done? “Impure thoughts” did not begin to cover it. Please, Saint Dominic Savio, childhood saint, don’t let Father recognize my voice.
I had hardened myself to the task at hand. I would march in and lay it all out so I could purify my temple for Jesus and start anew. No more lusting, no more leering, no more stiffies.
A chubby classmate named James Coombs was immediately ahead of me, and when he came out from his confession, he did something none of the other children had done. He closed the door to the cloakroom behind him. Click.
My turn. I walked up and tried the knob. I turned it back and forth. I rattled it. Nothing. Dear God the Father, dear Jesus, dear Holy Spirit, all the angels and saints in heaven, please don’t let it be locked. I shook the door again, this time more forcefully. I shot Coombs a dirty look, and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, I didn’t know. Fear rose in my throat. Father was in there waiting, wondering what had become of the next penitent. I knocked the door against its frame. I hit it with my shoulder. Then it opened.
There stood Father Schroeder, the pastor, looking down at me.
“Ah, Johnny Grogan, come in, my son. We’ll have to do something about that lock, won’t we?”
Oh, dear God, let me die now.
He took his place behind the partition, and I knelt, seeing his silhouette through the screen, smelling his aftershave mixed with the churchy mustiness of the room. I briefly weighed the two options before me: eternal damnation or immediate shame and humiliation. There was only one thing to do.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said. “This is my first confession.”
Then I lied my ass off.
Father Schroeder had a positive ID on me; he was friends with my parents and over at our house practically every week for
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dinner or lunch or just to say hello. I could tell the truth, confessing the shameful secret that at the ripe age of seven I was already a sexual deviant. I could come clean and face what seemed near-certain condemnation, humiliation, and excoriation by my parents, the nuns, and the principal, all of whom Father would surely tell after he was done screaming at me in the confessional so that all my classmates would hear, too. Or I could simply . . .
fudge a little. Actually, it would not be so much a lie as a small sin of omission. I would just leave a few things out.
“I fought with my brothers twelve times,” I confessed through the screen. “I disobeyed my parents six times. I lied to Sister about my homework two times.”
“Anything else, my son.”
“Not really, Father.”
“Go ahead,” he coaxed. “There must be something more.”
Oh God, he knew. He knew I was holding back. I had to give him something, anything. Anything but the truth. I started making things up.
“Well, I stole a radio.”
“A radio, you say?”
“Yes, Father.”
“You must return it, my son.”
“I can’t, Father.”
“But you must.”
“I threw it in the lake, Father.”
“Good Lord, Johnny, what possessed you?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know. And I . . .” My mind raced for a transgression that would at once be salacious enough to satisfy him without humiliating me. “I looked at naked ladies in National Geographic.” I could see his silhouette nod as though he had heard this one before. I searched for a number. “Sixty-seven times.”
“Sixty-seven?” Father asked. “Did you say sixty-seven?”
“Maybe sixty-eight, Father. I kind of lost count.”
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I filled out my list with age-appropriate misdeeds. “I lied to my parents ten times; used the Lord’s name in vain nine times; read my sister’s journal three times.” Finally, the priest seemed satisfied.
“Anything else, my son?”
“That about does it, Father.”
He mumbled absolution, blessed me, and gave me my penance—three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers. I bounded from the cloakroom with a mix of relief and dread.
My first confession. My chance to scrub my soul clean and return to the good graces of the Lord. And I had lied. Lied to Father and lied to God. What was worse, I knew there would be no going back now. I would have to lie in confession for the rest of my life. Because how could I ever confess to lying in my First Holy Confession? There was no choice now but to take these sins to the grave with me, and I knew what that meant.
I was seven years old and already doomed to an eternity in hell. Even the Protestants and Jews and Muslims would fare better than that.
Chapter 4
o
Growing up in Harbor Hills, I had two nearby play-
mates, but I never considered them friends. Next door was Cindy Ann Selahowski, the girl who was blind to
my crush on her mother. In the house behind us was a crusty-eyed boy named Lawrence who was still calling for his mother to wipe his behind when he was seven years old. As casual play-mates, they were fine. What I did not have was a best friend.
Then in 1966, when I was nine, a new family moved in on the next street. A family the likes of which I had never before known.
The parents spoke in clipped brogues and constantly walked around with mugs of milky tea in their hands. The father, who worked at one of the General Motors factories, had immigrated to the United States from Wales as a young man; the mother was from Ireland. Their accents were as strong as the day they stepped onto American soil. They were the Cullens, Bevan and Claire, colorful and opinionated—and blessed, if you could call it that, with six sons. The second oldest, Tommy, was my age.
Shortly after they moved in, I wandered over to check out the
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new kid and found him and his five brothers working in the yard with wheelbarrows, shovels, and rakes. In the driveway were towering piles of wood chips, dumped there for free by the power company. One wheelbarrow at a time, the Cullen boys were spreading the mulch around the one-acre property. Their home had gone up on a lot that was nearly pure sand, and Mr. Cullen was nothing if not thrifty and inventive. With six mouths to feed on a blue-collar paycheck, he did not have disposable income to pay a
landscaping company to lay down topsoil and sod. And so he struck a deal with the workers who trimmed tree branches away from the electric lines. They agreed to drop their trimmings for free at his house; it saved them the longer drive to the dump and tipping fees. You could call Mr. Cullen a pioneer organic gardener. From the old country, he brought the generational wisdom that plant matter—
branches, leaves, bark, grass clippings—would eventually break down into humus, the foundation of rich soil and a healthy lawn.
What he lacked in money, he made up for in time and energy—
and free child labor. He was a tightly wound bundle of muscles with enough confidence to fill a stadium, and his plan was to cover the entire sandy property with six inches of mulch, give it a year to break down into loam, till it under, and plant his grass seed.
Truck after truck pulled up that summer with huge steaming piles of debris. On that first visit, I said a few words to Tommy, then just stood watching as he hurried back to work before he got scolded. Mr. Cullen, working beside his boys, eventually noticed me. He paused, wiped the sweat from his brow, and shouted out in his heavy brogue, “Well, what are you waitin’ for, mon? Get your hands out of your pockets and grab a shovel!”
It was, I would learn over the years, Mr. Cullen’s pet peeve and signature command. Hands in pockets could do no work; they were idle and useless, the sign of a slouch. On an almost hourly basis, he would yell out at someone—a son, a neighborhood kid, the scouts he would oversee as scoutmaster—“Get your hands out of your pockets, mon!”
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On that first day, not knowing what else to do and unwilling to turn my back on his commanding presence, I did just what he ordered. I pulled my hands out of my pockets, grabbed a shovel, and began slinging mulch. There was something satisfying about the work, even if blisters quickly rose on my soft palms, and I returned day after day to help. Soon I was eating peanut butter sandwiches with the other boys at the long table in the Cullen kitchen. And soon Tommy and I were fast friends, as our parents would become, as well. The Cullens, like most of the families in the neighborhood, were Catholic and active in the parish. Like the Grogan kids, all six Cullen boys were enrolled at Refuge.