The Confession Read Online Free

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.
    Being a union man, Grandpa was consciously on patrol for the Good Fight. His faith in collective bargaining never wavered. But there came a time after the Great Depression when he had a falling out with the union hall—none of us grandkids is clear on the details—and was effectively blacklisted. Work assignments stopped coming his way, which plunged the family into painful hardship. But Grandpa never turned his back on the IUOE. Eventually the feud drew to a close—as mysteriously as it began—and the Smiths were restored to the burgeoning middle class.
    He and my grandmother settled in Jersey City’s relatively comfortable Greenville section and also kept a beachside bungalow in Cliffwood Beach. It wasn’t quite the Jersey Shore, whose resorts were popular among the upper crust. No celebrities went to Cliffwood Beach, with its collection of seasonal homes standing shoulder to shoulder on the sand.
    Of all my relatives, Grandma Smith, from whom I get my curly hair,was by far the most powerful influence on my life. The Church was her whole world. She attended Mass daily. From her I learned to say a novena, the Stations of the Cross, and the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the rosary. One of my earliest memories is watching her click her thumbnail on one bead after another, to the rhythmic murmur of her prayers.
    My sisters generally found other things to occupy them during our