More than anything, I think they realized they had met their match in Jenny and needed to clam up or risk losing me entirely.
If my mother was Little Napoleon, then Jenny was her Waterloo.
Mom seemed to understand she would not win this fight—not without losing her son as a casualty of war.
Soon enough there was another prize on the horizon that my parents did not want to risk losing a part of. Jenny was pregnant. The prospect of a grandchild excited them beyond words, and when the first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, my parents grieved with us, even as they attributed the loss to God’s mysterious plan. Soon enough we were expecting again, and in May 1992, we brought Patrick Joseph Grogan home from the hospital. We chose his middle name after Jenny’s father, but I was happy to let my parents believe I was carrying on their Mary-and-Joseph tradition. A week later, Jenny’s parents arrived to spend ten days with us, and the visit was comfortable and easy. Her mother took over the cooking and cleaning, and each day as I worked, Jenny and the baby would join her parents on an outing—to the mall, the Japanese gardens, even the beach, where Jenny could sit in the shade and nurse her newborn son.
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Two days after Jenny’s parents left, mine called from a camp-ground outside Atlanta where they had arrived the previous day in their motor home. They were on their way to see us and their first grandson, but the trip had another purpose: to make a pilgrimage to a farm in Conyers, Georgia, east of Atlanta, where apparitions of the Virgin Mary had been reported by the farm’s owner. The Catholic Church refused to endorse the alleged sight-ings, but the farm woman’s word was good enough for Mom and Dad.
“Our Blessed Mother says we all need to pray if we are to have any hope,” Mom said. Then she put Dad on the phone, and their pilgrimage to the latest alleged miracle site made more sense to me. He had news to share. On the day Patrick was born, Dad’s doctor had found a cancerous tumor on his prostate, and he was scheduled to begin radiation as soon as he returned from our place. He assured me the doctors were confident they could knock it into remission.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked.
“You were having your first baby,” he said. “I didn’t want to put a damper on your joy.”
“I never want to be kept in the dark, Dad,” I said. “Whatever the news, and whenever you get it, I want you to share it with me, okay?”
“Fair enough,” Dad said.
When they pulled up in their recreational vehicle the next evening, they both looked older and more fragile than I had remembered from just a few months earlier. For the previous dozen years, they had happily tooled all over the country and Mexico in their rolling home on a Chevrolet truck chassis, sight-seeing, visiting relatives, and making pilgrimages to various shrines and holy sites. But now I could see the strain on their faces, the weariness in their shoulders. At seventy-six, they were slowing down, and the rigors of long-distance road travel were clearly becoming too much for them. I realized with a tinge
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of sadness that this chapter of their lives would soon be coming to a close.
This was their first time visiting us since before we had decided to live together two years earlier, and I wanted it to go well.
But they were barely in the door when I sensed Jenny’s stress levels rising. As my mother cradled the baby, cooing over him, Jenny hovered nearby, clearly anxious. After dinner, she pulled me aside in the kitchen.
“Look,” she whispered. “I don’t want your mother trying one of her secret home baptisms on our baby.” I dismissed her concerns as ridiculous, but they were not without foundation. When my mother was a schoolgirl, she would secretly baptize the non-Catholic children she babysat. Even as an adult, she saw nothing wrong with this and told the story with great affection. She had been taught that lay Catholics could perform an emergency baptism in certain circumstances. In her eyes, she was rescuing her young charges from an eternity in limbo, that perpetual waiting room between heaven and hell that the nuns taught us was the final destination for the world’s millions of pagan babies. Jenny had heard the story, too, and now that she had her own child, she was unnerved by the possibility of her mother-in-law performing mysterious religious rituals over him without her knowledge.
“No one’s performing any secret baptisms,” I assured her, but I could see she wasn’t convinced. She would not let Patrick out of her sight.
On the surface, my parents’ visit was comfortable enough.
Mom took over most of the cooking, and Dad puttered around the yard. We made easy small talk, sticking to our unspoken list of safe topics. We sat down to meals, and they made no attempt to pray over the food. They were in our home and clearly playing by our rules. Yet as their stay progressed, my mother increasingly picked up on Jenny’s discomfort. At one point when she had me alone for a moment, she said, “Jenny acts like I’ve never held a baby before.
What, does she think I’m going to drop him or something?”
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“Chalk it up to new-mom jitters,” I told her. “Don’t take it personally, Mom.”
From my father’s glances, I knew he was offering her similar counsel when they were alone in their RV parked in the driveway.
While I was at work, they wanted to free Jenny up so she could run errands or catch up on her sleep without having to worry about the baby. But Jenny deflected their offers, taking him wher-ever she went, whether it was to the store or into the bedroom for a nap. They couldn’t help but feel snubbed.
Despite Jenny’s worries, my parents had no intention of attempting an emergency baptism on their grandson, but that did not mean they had forgotten about the promise we had made when we married in the Catholic faith. One evening I returned home from work to find them alone in the living room. Jenny had taken the baby and gone shopping. “She didn’t say when she’d be back,” Mom said with a wounded look.
I had barely kicked my shoes off when they jumped at the opportunity to speak to me privately. “Say, we’ve been meaning to ask you,” Dad began, and I braced for what I knew was coming.
“Have you set a date for the baptism?”
“We’re talking about it,” I said. And we had been.
“The baptism is important,” Dad said. “Without it, Patrick cannot have eternal salvation.”
“It’s something we’re working on,” I said.
“What’s to work on?” Mom snapped. “He’s already almost a month old. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”
“We plan to get to it,” I said.
Her face grew grave. “You do know that if something, God forbid, were to happen to him, he couldn’t go to heaven. He would be barred forever from entering our Lord’s kingdom.”
“I’m not too worried about that,” I said.
“Well, you should be.”
I felt the blood rising in my cheeks. “Do you really think God
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would cast aside an innocent infant just because his parents didn’t get around to having him baptized?” I could not resist adding:
“And do you really think a Catholic baby is somehow more sacred in God’s eyes than a Jewish baby or a Muslim baby—or a baby that’s nothing at all?” The Catholic belief that it was the “one true faith” had stuck in my craw for years.
“We’re all born with original sin,” Dad said. “By baptizing him, you’ll wash that sin away and let Patrick become a child of God.”
I held my tongue and stared at the floor.
“Let’s all pray together,” Mom suggested, and before I could protest, she grabbed my hand in one of hers and Dad’s hand in the other. Dad closed the circle by gripping my free hand with his.
“Let us bow our heads and pray,” he began. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
I bowed my head as we recited the Lord’s Prayer, b
ut all I could think was that if Jenny walked in the door, her worst fears would be confirmed: secret incantations going on behind her back.
I strained to listen for the sound of a car door slamming. Of the thousands of Our Fathers I had recited aloud, this one was the longest. When it finally ended, I said, “You really don’t need to worry about it. Patrick will be baptized. We just need to do it at our own pace.” Then I excused myself and went to the bathroom to splash water on my face.
The next morning, on the sixth day of what was to have been a ten-day visit, my parents announced they had decided to cut their visit short and leave the following day for home. The official reason was that South Florida’s steamy weather was too uncomfortable for them, which I knew to be true. Mom especially wilted in even moderate heat and humidity. They were also worried about Dad’s prostate cancer and the radiation regimen that awaited him. “I have to admit I’m not looking forward to what’s
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coming,” he said. “I might as well get back home and get it over with.” But I knew the strain with Jenny had something to do with it as well.
Oddly, that evening was the most relaxed of the visit. Jenny and my mother were both noticeably at ease. They chatted amia-bly, and we all laughed as Mom told funny stories from her childhood and mine. I asked more about the cancer, and the planned bone scan that would tell him whether it had spread beyond his prostate. Dad said, “It’s in God’s hands. Whatever the Lord chooses for me, that’s what it will be.”
Mom chimed in: “We have dedicated our lives to spreading our Blessed Mother’s message, and we still have a lot of work to do. I can’t do it without your dad, so I know the Lord is going to give him many more healthy years with me.”
“We still have too much work to do,” Dad agreed. I knew they were not just putting on brave faces. This was what they believed.
I marveled at their complete and unshakable faith.
The next morning Jenny packed them a picnic lunch and I helped load the motor home. Everything stayed upbeat until Dad leaned over to say good-bye to his grandson. As he stroked the back of his hand on Patrick’s cheek, Mom began to weep. Her bullish confidence seemed to have vanished overnight. I imagined she was wondering if her husband would live long enough to see his grandson again.
The juxtaposition of my son’s life just beginning and my father’s in jeopardy was not lost on me, either. I wanted to say something profound to Dad, but the words did not come. Instead, I gave Mom a long hug and Dad the famous Grogan handshake, squeezing his hand in mine a little longer than I might have otherwise. I told them how much it meant to me that they had made the trip. As I watched them lumber off in the motor home, a pain seared my heart like an electric shock. Even though inside the house waited a wife who loved me and a beautiful son who would be my joy for the rest of my years, I could not help feeling oddly
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alone. Standing on the curb watching as they turned the corner, I saw it clearly: one family just beginning on life’s voyage, another approaching journey’s end.
In September, when Patrick was four months old, Jenny and I brought him to Michigan to be baptized in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Refuge. True to her word to Father David, Jenny said she would not stand in the way if that was what I wanted. And even though I no longer even pretended to be a practicing Catholic (when asked, my stock response was “I was raised Catholic”), it was what I wanted. I was hard-pressed to explain why. I was no longer a spiritual Catholic, and maybe I never had been, but I still considered myself Catholic. It was part of who I was and part of what I wanted my children to become. I knew that my parents—Dad in particular—considered this the exact wrong reason to baptize a child. The words cultural Catholic, with their embrace of the nostalgia of the faith without the faith itself, were anathema to him. Yet I could not deny that the term fit me.
Whatever my reasons, Mom and Dad rejoiced at the news of our decision. When I called home to tell them we would have him baptized at Refuge, they both immediately began planning the guest list.
“Um, Jenny and I were thinking we’d keep it small,” I interrupted. “You know, just immediate family.”
“Nonsense,” Mom said. “We need to invite the neighbors. And the relatives. And the prayer group. I’ll host the reception afterward.”
“Mom,” I said, the exasperation rising in my voice.
“What? You want to show off your baby, don’t you? Besides, if you don’t, people will start to wonder if there’s something wrong with him.”
“Wrong? Like he’s the Hunchback of West Palm Beach?” I said.
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“People talk,” she said. “My grandson is perfect in every way, and I want to show him off.”
More important, I suspected, she wanted to show off the fact that her grandson would no longer be a godless pagan baby. I dip-lomatically tried to temper her enthusiasm, telling her we needed to be respectful of Jenny’s sensibilities as the mother. “You don’t want to spook her, Mom,” I said.
“Why on earth would this spook anyone?” she responded. “By the way, now that you’ve started a family, don’t you think it’s time you think about returning to Mass again?”
In the end, I won a few concessions, but Mom largely got what she wanted. Jenny repeated that this was my event, and she was going to stay out of it, which mostly she did.
Father Joe’s lifelong love of Lucky Strikes had finally caught up with him, and he had died of cancer the previous year, slipping away peacefully in Marijo’s former bedroom, where my parents had nursed him around the clock in his final months. But Father Vin remained healthy and vital, living in a log cabin in the Michigan woods, and he happily agreed to come out of retirement to officiate.
We asked Rock and his wife to be the godparents, and they drove in from Chicago for the big day. As they held Patrick in their arms, Father Vin launched into the rites of baptism, a surprisingly large part of which involved driving the devil from our baby’s tarnished soul.
I knew it was going to be hard on Jenny when Father Vin announced to the thirty or so people gathered in the sanctuary that he was going to start off with “a prayer of exorcism.”
“Almighty Father,” Father Vin prayed, “you sent your holy son into the world to cast out the power of Satan, prince of evil, and to rescue man from the kingdom of darkness. We pray for this child to set him free from original sin and make him a temple for your whole spirit to dwell within him.” From the side of my eye I could see Jenny’s mouth tighten.
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“Do you reject sin?” Father Vin asked in a clear voice, beckoning us to answer on Patrick’s behalf and our own.
As a group, we responded, “I do.” Jenny sat motionless, a look of quiet distress spreading across her face.
“Do you reject the glamour of evil?”
“I do.”
“Do you reject Satan, father of sin, prince of darkness?” Jenny’s hands, resting on the pew, tightened into ashen fists. The thought of an exorcism being held over her precious infant was too much for her. I imagined she was waiting for Patrick’s head to start spinning on its neck like Linda Blair’s did in The Exorcist, and I could tell she was fighting the urge to grab her baby and bolt for the exit.
I leaned in close until my lips rested against her ear. “Lamaze breathing,” I whispered. “Quick, shallow breaths. Blow it away.” I made little puffing sounds. “We’re almost done.”
Three times, Father Vin splashed water over Patrick’s head as he chanted, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” He used his thumb to rub sacred oils onto our son’s forehead, chest, and back in the sign of a cross and placed a starched linen bib on him to signify his purification from original sin.
“Patrick Joseph, you have become a new creation,” my uncle pronounced. “I claim you for Christ our savior by the s
ign of the cross.”
Then it was over. The neighbors and relatives crowded around to coo over Patrick. Father Vin playfully hoisted his great-nephew in the air and congratulated him for uttering barely a squawk during the ceremony. “You’re a Christian now,” he said. “All baptized.”
Off to the side, I slipped my arm around Jenny and rubbed her back.
“That Satan is so far out of here, he’s halfway to Pluto by now,” I said, trying to make her laugh. “Father Vin kicked Satan’s
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ass! If Patrick takes the wrong path in life, we won’t have the devil to blame.”
She gave me a little smile.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Definitely ready for a beer.”
“Me, too,” I agreed. “Maybe a couple.” And on the way home for Mom’s punch-and-cookie reception, I made a quick detour to the party store on the corner where Tommy and I used to loiter and bought a twelve-pack.
Chapter 24
o
Thirteen months after Patrick’s baptism, Jenny and I
welcomed another member into our family. We bap-
tized him Conor Richard, but this time we did it on our own turf, at the local parish in West Palm Beach where Father Beady Eyes had coached us on the rhythm method. It was a group ceremony, with several babies being baptized together, and the priest was more subdued than my uncle about exorcising Satan from the souls of the innocent. Because of the distance and my parents’ advancing age, they did not attend, and that simplified matters, too. Jenny and I were both surprisingly relaxed, and later I sent photos to my parents so they would have proof their second grandchild, too, had been accepted into God’s embrace.