The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

  I glanced over at Tommy; he was as white as chalk. Then I saw why. On the desk in front of him in plain view sat the Fugs

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  album cover. It was the one part of our brilliant plan we had overlooked. There was no hiding it now. He folded his hands over it, and we both stared straight ahead. Within seconds, Tommy was busted. Sister ordered him to the principal’s office. Not long after, I was summoned, too. As a co-conspirator with advanced knowledge of the crime, I was in nearly as much trouble.

  The principal, Sister Mary Noel, segregated us, Tommy in her office and me in the tiny nurse’s station across the hall. She dealt with him first, as I waited with clammy palms. Finally the door opened and in she walked. I was expecting her to be angry, but she mostly looked sad.

  “Mr. Grogan, tell me this,” she began, and I braced for an in-terrogation on the Fugs conspiracy. But her questions had nothing to do with it. “What are you going to be in this life?” she asked.

  “Are you going to be a tree that spreads its roots deep and reaches proudly to the sky? Or are you going to be a weed that bends in any breeze and never grows to its full potential?” I stared blankly at her. What in God’s name is she talking about?

  “You come from solid stock, John Grogan. Your parents planted an acorn that has the potential to grow into a mighty oak. But you choose to mingle in the weeds instead of growing strong. You could be a leader in the forest, standing tall above all the other trees. The weeds never amount to anything. They don’t take root and are quickly overshadowed by the other trees.

  Is that what you want?”

  Sister Noel pushed her face close to mine. “What are you going to be? A solid oak? Or a common weed wallowing in the ditch?”

  I sat silently. Frankly, I didn’t want to be either. I liked being a boy just fine. And if being an oak tree meant turning my back on Tommy—and it was dawning on me that that was what Sister was getting at—I’d take my chances as a weed. Tommy was my best friend; we’d grow together side by side.

  “An oak or a weed?” Sister repeated. “Only you can decide.”

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  She told me she was going to let me sit there to think about the choice before me, and on her way out the door she turned back and said it one more time: “An oak or a weed?”

  Our parents were called, and that night at home I tried to put the best spin on the day’s events. The incident confirmed my parents’ opinion of rock music as an evil, perverted influence on their children’s lives. A couple of years earlier, I had pranced through the house singing the words to the Rolling Stones song “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and my shocked mother confiscated the album, saying, “The sacred union of a man and a woman should never be trivialized. Our Lord blesses it only within the sacrament of marriage.”

  The Fugs made those lyrics seem quaint by comparison. I feigned innocence, telling them it was Tommy’s idea and I had no clue what was on that album or that he planned to put it on and turn up the volume. I had been wrongly ensnared, I insisted, because he was my best friend, a case of guilt by association. I felt a little bad blaming it all on him, but I knew my parents would never confront Mr. and Mrs. Cullen about it. And besides, I was pretty sure that at that exact moment he was blaming it all on me. We had covered for each other this way before. That’s what best friends were for. My parents looked at me skeptically and said what they always said, that they believed me and that I deserved whatever punishment the good sisters saw fit to impose.

  Tommy and I spent the next week reporting to the convent each day after school. For bringing The Fugs and the F-word into the halls of Our Lady of Refuge, there would be no beatings or knuckle-raps or twisted ears. For this offense, we were ordered to do something we had never heard of any other student being ordered to do—enter the private, mysterious residence of the Sisters of Saint Felix to work on our hands and knees.

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  The convent was made of brick, large and imposing, and inside it was dark and smelled of fried food and floor wax. There was a chapel lit only by votive candles in red glass canisters where the nuns prayed, and small, cell-like rooms where they slept. Tommy and I were put to work scrubbing the baseboards and washing walls on all three floors. It really wasn’t so bad, and when we were done each evening, the sisters led us into the kitchen and gave us each a glass of milk and a dish of whatever they were having for dinner. I remember lots of boiled meats and vegetables.

  One afternoon as we scooted along the second-floor hallway on our knees with our buckets and scrub brushes, Tommy and I heard the soft click of a latch. A door opened in front of us, and out stepped one of the ancient nuns. But something was not right, and soon I saw what: her habit and headdress were missing, replaced by a floral housecoat and slippers. What shocked us most was to see her without her veil and face boards. She had cropped gray hair. Her face was wrinkled and saggy, fuller and softer than it looked wedged into her headgear. We stared up at her. She was no longer the harsh, humorless authority figure from school, but simply an old and tired lady. It took her a moment to notice us, and when she did, she hurried past without a word and disappeared down the hall.

  “Whoa! Did you see that?” Tommy asked.

  “Whoa!” I said.

  As we worked, Tommy and I snooped around, peering into closets and down staircases and listening to the smothering silence.

  A favorite rumor around school was that the nuns maintained a secret tunnel beneath the playground connecting the convent to the rectory, allowing late-night liaisons with the priests. Tommy and I set out to prove its existence once and for all, but what we discovered instead was a place so oppressive, it felt like a black hole from which not even sunlight could escape. There were no sounds in there. No laughter or music or chatting voices. Only the

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  hushed whispers of prayer and the creaks of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum.

  It hardly seemed equitable. Across the soccer field, the priests lived in a house much like any in the neighborhood, large and breezy and comfortable. They had a housekeeper and cook, a color television and stereo, thick woven rugs, a regulation pool table, a wine cellar, and a well-stocked bar from which they could enjoy a cocktail at the end of the day.

  But here in the convent, there were none of those comforts.

  The sisters had taken vows of poverty, and they lived in utter austerity. Their only recreation, as far as I could see, were the evening walks they took in pairs around the neighborhood. No wonder they were always so grim. My stint scrubbing the convent had opened my eyes to these alien creatures in brown wool who ruled their students without mercy. They weren’t beasts or ogres.

  They were women. Women who had given their lives to God and the Church. From what I could tell, many of them were lonely and isolated and demoralized. Even then I had to ask, If God is really up there calling the shots, and if he is all great and all merciful as we were taught, why would he treat these women who had sacrificed their lives in his service so harshly? Why would he treat his male servants so much better? To my parents, this was just the way it was. Men and women answered God’s call in different ways. To them, the priests deserved adulation and creature comforts, and the nuns were happy in their simple lives of deprivation. I wasn’t buying it. The nuns, I decided, needed their own advocate, their own patron saint, someone like Saint Joan of Arc not afraid to fight for what she believed. But then look what happened to that strong woman. We learned all about her in school. Burned at the stake as a heretic.

  Sister Nancy Marie, as we knew she would, eventually for-gave us our trespasses. Just as Jesus would have done, she returned to her cheery ways and earnest looks. Neither Tommy nor

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  I ever did replace that Fugs album. The truth was, the only thing it had going for it were the dirty words. We liked to think we sacrificed it for the greater glo
ry of our cause—to let the nuns know the battle was not over, and we would grow into whatever kind of trees we wanted. We were pretty sure The Fugs, if they ever found out, would have approved.

  Chapter 11

  o

  My parents were the trusting sort, even when I gave

  them every reason not to be. The evidence against

  me could be overwhelming, as it was in the Fugs

  incident, but if I pleaded my innocence earnestly enough they usually bought the story, no matter how far-fetched. Or at least they pretended to. When, on a scout campout, Dad caught a group of us inside a tent smoking, I told him an unnamed older boy from a neighboring campsite had given us two cigarettes to try, and “a few of us”—the clear inference being that I was not one of them—had lit them up. It was a transparent lie. All he had to do was smell my breath or fingers to catch me. But Dad accepted my account. Just as he had accepted the story that the Penthouse he found hidden in the culvert under our driveway must have been stashed there by unknown neighbor kids. Dad wasn’t dumb; he wasn’t naive.

  He wanted to believe what he wanted to believe—that his son, a good Catholic boy who received Holy Communion every Sunday and confessed his sins once a month, would not let him down. He and Mom always seemed to give me the benefit of the doubt.

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  Usually I did not deserve their blind trust, but there was one time I ended up wrongly accused, and from that day forward I never again took their faith in me for granted.

  The smoking tree down by the water, in addition to being my gang’s gathering spot for cigarettes, swearing, and stolen Boone’s Farm, was a place I went often by myself. On these solo trips, I did nothing more delinquent than sit and stare across the water and daydream. Early on, my father had instilled in me a deep love of nature and the outdoors, and I could sit for hours in the woods fantasizing about wilderness survival. When I was in Boy Scouts, Dad regularly took me into the woods, where he taught me how to use the sun as a compass, fashion a lean-to from pine boughs, and forage edible plants from the forest floor. I read everything I could find on the topic and knew how to splint a broken leg with a tree branch, weave vines into rope, and brew tea from staghorn sumac. Fire-making was a particular point of pride for me. I learned how to find dry kindling even in the soggiest conditions, arrange sticks so the air could wick through them, and nurse the feeblest flame to life. I practiced until I never needed more than one match. I built my fires responsibly, always careful to fully extinguish them before leaving.

  On a chilly fall day after school at the start of eighth grade, I whistled for Shaun and the two of us headed down to the smoking tree. Shaun chased ducks into the water and fetched rocks off the bottom, and I decided to build a small fire. I peeled a few shavings of papery bark off a white birch for my tinder, gathered a variety of kindling and dry sticks, positioned them into a tepee, and lit the bark. One match and a few soft puffs on the flame, and I had a cheery little blaze to sit beside as I dreamed of surviving in the Yukon with nothing but a jackknife and flint and steel. As the sun set over the lake, I let the little fire die, then stirred the embers into the sand. Twenty feet away was a neighbor’s wood dock, out of the water and piled in sections against the bluff for the winter. Beneath it were some charred driftwood and a mess

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  of spent matches from what looked like a long-ago attempt at a campfire. I thought nothing of it other than to disdain whoever needed to use so many matches to start one blaze.

  I whistled for Shaun and then, just for the sheer joy of being a boy outdoors with his dog on a crisp fall evening, began to run.

  I raced up the bluff and sprinted across the field back home as if a bear were on my tail. It was the running that must have caught Mr. Simpson’s eye. He lived next to the vacant lot, and he was second only to Old Man Pemberton as the grouchiest grown-up in the neighborhood. He had shooed my friends and me off the vacant lot more than once.

  I was home only a few minutes, washing up for dinner, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and it was Mr. Simpson. He asked to speak to my father. Dad came and invited him inside, but something I could not make out was mumbled, and Dad stepped out on the porch and shut the door behind him. The two men stood in the cold talking for several minutes, and when Dad came in he had a look that told me there was a problem.

  “Were you down at the water across the street just now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I took Shaun for a swim.”

  “Were you messing around with matches?”

  Dad knew my skill as a one-match fire-maker. I was surprised at his choice of words. I told him about making the little fire and sitting beside it before burying it in sand and heading home.

  “Did you run away for some reason?” he asked.

  I began to see where the questions were leading. How do you explain sprinting wildly from a fire for no reason other than to feel the wind in your face and your heart beat against your ribs?

  “I just felt like running,” I said.

  Then he came out with it: “Mr. Simpson thinks you tried to set his dock on fire. He saw you running away, and when he went down, he found combustibles piled up and burned matches, and warm coals nearby. You were the only one down there.”

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  “Dad,” I said.

  “This is serious, John. He wants to call the police.”

  “Dad, I didn’t do it. I saw those matches, too. It wasn’t me.”

  It sounded as lame as all my other lies. Yes, I was down there with matches. Yes, I had lit a fire. Yes, there were dying coals in the sand nearby. Yes, I had sprinted manically from the scene.

  But no, I had nothing to do with it. “Dad, honest, I didn’t—”

  He stopped me in midsentence. “I know you didn’t,” he said.

  “I’ll talk to him.” Then he added the words that meant so much:

  “I believe you.”

  Over the years I had given him so many reasons not to believe. Now for the first time I needed him to, and he did. He had taken my version over the version of a grown-up. I wanted to throw myself in his arms, to hug him, and to reassure him that this time his faith was not misplaced. But being a Grogan man, I did as Grogan men were expected to do. And Grogan men didn’t hug, they didn’t kiss, and they never said, “I love you.” I jabbed my hand toward him, and he grasped it in his and shook it vigorously. The robust Grogan handshake.

  “Now, let’s go eat,” Dad said.

  Eighth grade drifted by, and as graduation approached, every one of my friends gushed about heading to the state-of-the-art public high school recently built a few miles down Orchard Lake Road.

  It had a swimming pool, tennis courts, a groomed running track, a sunny courtyard, and an acoustically tuned performing arts auditorium. Our tax dollars at work, and everyone was going.

  Tommy and Rock and Sack and Doggie and all the cute girls from the neighborhood. Everyone, that is, except me.

  My parents enrolled me at Brother Rice, an all-boys Catholic high school in Birmingham, a half-hour drive away in one of Detroit’s wealthiest suburbs. The kids who attended Brother Rice were the same kids whose parents owned memberships at

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  the country club where I caddied. Tim and Mike had gone there, and both told hair-raising stories of the sadistic disciplinary techniques of the Irish Christian Brothers who ran the place, tactics that made those of the Sisters of Saint Felix sound quaint by comparison. Tim hated all four of his years there; he bristled at the authority, at the wealth and hypocrisy, at the religious doctrine crammed down his throat. Michael, who years earlier had abandoned his priestly aspirations but still loved everything Catholic, felt at home there. As for me, I didn’t want to be separated from my friends, but I accepted Brother Rice as a given. It was where the Grogan sons were meant to go, just as the Grogan daughter was meant to attend
Marian, the all-girls Catholic high school separated from the boys’ school by a drainage moat. Marijo and Tim were now both attending Catholic colleges, and Mike was on his way to one in the fall. We were preordained for Catholic education. It was the one thing on which my frugal parents did not mind spending their savings.

  Shortly after dousing myself in hot wax, I had hung up my cassock for good and retired from the altar-boy corps. That did not mean I had a choice about attending Mass. In our home, Mass fell in the same category as breathing. Each Sunday morning began the same way: Mom waking us with that feather of hers and saying, “Get up, lazybones, time for Mass.”

  Nearly every Sunday, Dad served on the altar beside the priest. He was a lay minister, which meant that he read scripture and intentions for the sick, announced hymns, and led the congregation in liturgical responses. He even got to distribute communion from the altar rail, right alongside the priest. Dad took his duties seriously, and he genuflected reverentially every time he passed in front of the Blessed Sacrament. He bowed his head deeply in prayer and sang at the top of his lungs. Unlike Mom, who couldn’t hold a tune if the Pope himself requested it,

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  Dad had a good voice and wasn’t shy about using it. He sang and recited prayers with his eyes closed, something he could do because he had every hymn lyric and every prayer fully committed to memory. When the priest raised the communion host skyward at the moment of consecration, Dad would bow deeply and press a fist to his heart as if he had just witnessed something so magnificent it was blinding. It’s hard to describe his bearing on the altar without making him sound sanctimonious. And some thought he was, including one condescending priest who, it came back to us, had sneeringly dubbed him Holy Richard. But he wasn’t; he was merely caught up in the rapture of his faith. He was the exact same way when no one was watching. Dad was a night-hawk, always the last to bed, and sometimes I would get up late at night to use the bathroom and peek into my parents’ bedroom to find him on his knees lost in silent prayer, his head buried in the covers of the bed inches from his sleeping wife. His devotion was no act.