Ch 5: Pardon
Through a timely death, my parents are publicly exonerated but privately the secrets become more complicated to unravel.
Although my parents were legally married in Colorado, that didn’t matter to the Catholic Church. Because Dad was divorced, they lived in sin. That meant that as long as Dad’s first wife was alive, the Church barred them from receiving the sacraments. As a result of this, my parents faced public humiliation at Mass every Sunday. I can still see them both, all dressed up in their Sunday best—Dad with a sport jacket and tie and Mom with a dress, white gloves, and a veil poised gently over her graying hair. After kneeling through the consecration of the bread and wine, they would sit back in the pew, lift the kneeler up in front of them so people could pass, and wait. Others around them stood, made their way out of the pew, walked up to the communion rail with hands folded and heads bowed, took the host, which according to Catholic tradition had become the body of Christ, into their mouths, and returned to their seats.
After I turned seven and received my First Communion, I became more conscious of the stares. Before then, I sat back with them, played with my rosary or thumbed through the missal, while we waited together. But when I left them sitting there while I went up to receive Communion, I knew people wondered what they had done, why they sat back instead of rising up with their children. I kept my head bowed, not because I was praying, but so I couldn’t see their stares. My parents’ shame tainted me until my own soul felt dirty. When I returned to our pew, I prayed that God would forgive them so I could be purified too.
I imagine my mother experienced this mortification as penance for the sins she only ever hinted at to me. “If you only knew the things I’ve done,” she would whisper to me when I got a little older. I knew not to ask what those things were. She would never have told me anyway. But I wondered. I liked to think that my mom was too good a person to do anything really bad, so I imagined that her shame had to have been the result of things done to her. But either way, I knew that she lived in a shroud of guilt and shame too thick for anything or anyone to penetrate.
One hot, summer day, an unexpected phone call freed my parents from their public embarrassment. I don’t know who called. All I know is that when Dad hung up the phone, he told us that Aunt Betty, his first wife, had died. Although I hadn’t seen Aunt Betty in years, I remembered and loved her, so the news made me sad. I couldn’t judge my parents’ mood, so I didn’t know if it was OK to show them how I felt. My eleven-year-old self didn’t understand the implications her death to my parents’ life. All I know is that the first Saturday morning after learning of Betty’s death, my brother and I awoke to an empty house. That had never happened before.
“Mom and Dad are gone!” I exclaimed to my brother as I prodded him awake. “Where do you think they went?”
My distress was clearly not shared as he rolled over and mumbled, “Leave me alone,” pulling the pillow over his head.
When Mom and Dad finally returned a couple of hours later, I was shocked to see that they were all dressed up. Clearly, they had been somewhere important. And without us! But when I pushed Mom for more information, she replied with an unfamiliar brusqueness, “We just had some business to take care of.”
Still not satisfied, I hovered over her as she squatted down and filed something away in the small metal file box they kept in the hall closet. That’s when I glimpsed the words “Holy Matrimony” on the paper she tried to surreptitiously slip into a file folder. What is that? I thought. Why is she putting away something to do with marriage? I knew better than to press her any further. Being an inquisitive child, and already well-trained in the art of secrecy, I decided I would investigate on my own at a later time.
I seized the first chance I had to see what she had hidden away. Later that same afternoon Mom ran out to the grocery store and Dad, pretending to be engrossed in a Notre Dame football game on TV, fell asleep on the couch. To be certain he was sleeping, I positioned myself on the floor between him and the TV and waited for him to tell me to move. When he didn’t complain, I creeped down the hallway to the linen closet.
I put my hand on the round, metal doorknob and gentled the right-side accordion door open. It squeaked, and I grimaced. I listened to make sure Dad hadn’t awakened. A commercial blared from the TV, but I couldn’t hear any other sounds. I turned back to the task at hand. Not wanting to risk more noise from opening the left-side door, I knelt down and crawled, the way an 11-year old child can, into the closet. I grabbed the top of the metal file and pulled the latch back that held it in place.
I found it right away—about halfway back, in a folder simply called Papers—a Certificate of Holy Matrimony from St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, dated that day. I maneuvered my body to see the certificate in the light from the hallway, and as I did my back banged against the inside of the closet door. Afraid I would get caught, my heart skipped a beat.
That didn’t stop me though from sitting back on my knees and smiling. I felt as if the Holy Spirit had come down from heaven and washed all our souls clean. Even as a child, I knew what this meant. Mom and Dad were now married in the church. All censure was lifted – they could receive the sacraments again. They had been pardoned. As an earnest Catholic child, this meant everything to me.
I slid the paper back into the folder where I found it, wiggled out of the closet, glanced back down the hallway, and seeing it clear, guided the door back to a closed position.
The next day, at Sunday Mass, I beamed with pride as Mom and Dad, for the first time as a married couple, rose with Jarrett and me to receive Holy Communion. Everything was OK now. We had become a holy family. No one would stare at us again.
That holy veil enveloped my family for a couple more years until, at the age of thirteen, I left the cocoon of my parents’ house to spend the summer on my Aunt Babe and Uncle Paul’s farm. On this, my first solo adventure, I discovered that my family’s secrets might have permeated the thick walls meant to encase them.
Aunt Babe and Uncle Paul lived on a sixty-acre farm midway between Ann Arbor and Plymouth, Michigan. They had no children, although they seemed to love them, so I always wondered why they defied the norms of the day, especially the norms of other farmers, who typically depended on big families to help with the work.
Mom and Babe couldn’t have been more different. Aunt Babe was older, taller—about 5’8”as compared to my Mom’s diminutive 5’2”—and much heavier than my Mom. Mom was a well-mannered introvert who preferred refined indoor settings where, over morning coffee, she and her friends formed deep bonds with talk of husbands, kids, and the latest community happenings. Aunt Babe, on the other hand, was a gregarious extrovert. “Rough and Ready” she called herself—an epithet she embraced with vigor. Aunt Babe loved the outdoors, enjoyed getting dirty, and appreciated hard work. All things my mother deplored.
I favored Aunt Babe’s approach to life. Going to the farm was my idea of heaven. I relished clawing my way to the top of the tumbling corn in the corn crib, taking walks with Uncle Paul to survey the back forty, picking wild raspberries and licking their juices off my fingers, and cutting bittersweet branches to decorate the kitchen table. I adored sitting down in the brooder house so that thousands of fluffy, yellow baby chicks could scramble over and around me. I devoured Aunt Babe’s fried chicken—usually, a hen she had slaughtered just that afternoon—mashed potatoes dripping with butter, and home-made strawberry-rhubarb pie. I squealed with delight when Aunt Babe offered Uncle Paul and me ice cream fresh from Cloverdale Dairy to accompany our TV watching at night. I breathed in the farm smells and breathed out the farm skies.
One afternoon, though, soon after I arrived for my long-anticipated summer visit, a simple question spoiled my farm adventure. Babe and I stopped at a corner market down the road, one of the many markets they serviced with their egg business. The owner was an old friend who greeted Babe warmly. When Babe introduced me as her niece, the owner, a gray-haired woman with a big smile, leaned over the counter and asked the question—the one I’d faced all my life.
“Where’d you get your red hair?” (For more about this question, read A Letter to Mom: #2.)
Before the pre-programmed response tumbled from my mouth, “From my dad. My dad has red hair,” my aunt snapped the answer right off my tongue. ‘We don’t know,” she pronounced, “Both her parents had black hair,” and then whipped around and marched to the back of the store toward the milk cooler.
I stood there without uttering a word, busying myself with the penny candy in front of the counter. The afternoon sun reflected off the glass behind the bins, making the candy feel sticky to my hands. I wiped them on my shorts, but that didn’t seem to help. Why did she say that? That’s not what we say.
I walked over to a poster of the Marlboro Man hanging on the wall to wait for Aunt Babe to check out. I longed for the days when I used to wear a cowboy hat like his, so I could look tough and hide my red hair at the same time. Why did it seem like Aunt Babe was covering something up when she was really telling the truth? At least what I had been told was the truth.
When we got back in the truck to head back to the farm, I didn’t ask her about it. Nor did I ask her when we sat down to dinner with Uncle Paul. I didn’t want to upset her, and I had a feeling that bringing it up again might. When my month on the farm ended, I returned home full of even more questions and a growing uneasiness that something about my family didn’t add up.
I’d never actually seen a picture of my father. That, in and of itself, was strange. Mom had told me why she didn’t have any—that Dad had made her get rid of all her photos of Bob and Marlee, so he could be our only dad (if you missed it, you can read about that in Ch 4: Whisperings). On one of the rare occasions when Mom mentioned him, she told me Bob had black hair, like hers, confirming what Aunt Babe told the storekeeper. So, if I didn’t share his hair color, I wondered if I looked like Bob in other ways. Did I have his eyes? His build? The questions just prompted other questions that I didn’t know how to answer.
As I grew up, I noticed other threads that didn’t belong in the book that was our family’s story. But the question: “where did my red hair really come from?” haunted and stayed with me, the way a reader might fold the corner of a page in a mystery novel that holds a clue to solving the crime.
Read “Chapter 6: Science and the Art of Persuasion.”
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I don't know if you all were at St. Vincent's during that time, but I never noticed that your mom and dad didn't receive communion. I know a little something about how they must've felt. One Sunday (I was in my mid-teens) Father Bujarski passed me over at the communion rail. I learned shortly thereafter (from him) that he had refused to serve me communion because I had combed my hair down over my forehead, mop-top/Beatlesque style. It was nothing compared to the distress your mom and dad must've felt, but I was mortified...! That was undoubtedly a contributing factor in the end of my faith in the catholic church.
Oh, to be smothered by little baby chicks!!! 🐣🐤🐥