23

My mom knocked on the bedroom door as she cracked it open. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” I had already gotten in bed and was waiting for Joe to finish putting Donald to sleep for the night. Donald was still battling his caffeine hangover, so it was taking longer than usual to get him settled down.

She handed me a small hardcover book with a dark green dust jacket, G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. “You left this in the living room.”

“Thanks,” I said. I instinctively set it down facedown on the night table.

“I got something from Kevin today,” she said, referring to one of her siblings. “It’s a copy of an old letter that was sent to our family, from someone who served with Pop Pop in World War II.” She held out an envelope with a postmark from my Uncle Kevin’s city.

My grandfather died when I was in the second grade, two years after my grandmother. He’d had a stroke before I was born and so was never able to communicate with me verbally. One of my few memories of him was of the time he visited my Montessori preschool when he was in town to stay with us. When he first ambled in, unable to speak clearly and missing multiple fingers due to an accident, the other children backed away in fear. Yet after only a few minutes, they recognized the unconditional love and acceptance that exuded from him and saw his unmistakable delight at spending a few moments with his granddaughter. By the time my mom helped him back to the car, the kids were following him and asking him to stay.

My mom slid the letter out of the envelope and placed it in my hands. It was written after my grandfather received the Bronze Star Medal, the author identifying himself as a Private First Class who wanted to make sure that the full story about Lieutenant Tom Geraghty was known.

“On a bitter night, a number of men were pinned down by German fire at the turbulent Isar River,” the private wrote. “Among them were men who were wounded and dying there on the German side of the river. Some were bleeding and helpless in midstream.”

My grandfather volunteered to get them, the private explained. Everyone said it was a suicide mission. He went anyway, crossing the river under heavy fire, and brought the wounded men back. “Wow,” I said under my breath as I flipped to the last page. “I wanted you to see that,” my mom said. She seemed to be about to get up, then she stopped. “I also wanted to say . . . you remember that he was Catholic, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. Though I knew that my mom had been raised Catholic, it rarely came to mind. My grandparents lived thousands of miles away from us in the few short years that our lives overlapped, so I hadn’t been around them enough to see them practice their faith. I had no memories of them going to church or doing anything spiritual, but their religion was a fact that I’d had filed away in the archives of my mind.

“I just wanted you to know—” she hesitated, religion not being a subject that either of us ever enjoyed talking about. “With these books you’re reading, going to Mass and everything. I wanted you to know that he would be proud of you.”

The thought of my Catholic grandparents whom I never had the chance to get to know unleashed a surprising burst of emotion within me. I only nodded in response.

There seemed to be something else she wanted to say. We sat in silence for another moment before she added, “You remember that you were baptized Catholic, right?”

“What?” I said, more loudly than I’d meant to. The news struck me like finding a fascinating memento that had long been buried in a box in the attic. It wasn’t news to me, but it was not something we ever discussed. It hadn’t even come to mind since Joe and I had been researching Catholicism. What significance did it have that I was carried into a Catholic church to have water poured on my head when I was six months old, when I had no recollection of it and had nothing to do with this belief system for decades afterward? I lived my life so far removed from this religion that when I asked someone a dumb question in high school and she answered sarcastically, “Is the pope Catholic?” I had to ask her, “Is the pope Catholic?” I didn’t know if it was a rhetorical yes or no.

“My parents were there, of course, when you were, baptized” my mom said. “It was important to them that we do that.”

I looked down at the letter in her hand, which she’d refolded and now held on top of the envelope. I thought of my grandfather, the war hero who could never speak to me, yet whose blue eyes expressed a strength that hinted at the man he once was. Normally my memory of him was two-dimensional and incomplete; when I brought him to mind it was like trying to piece together a ripped photograph from its fragments. But as I sat on the bed next to my mom, my image of him was more vivid than ever before. It wasn’t that I could remember any more details about him, but, rather, that in some strange way he felt more real than other times I’d thought about him, as if he were present in the room.

In my recent reading I’d learned that Catholics believe that supernatural forces act in a real way in our world and that the Church has never wavered on ancient, mystical beliefs that would be sure to get you laughed out of enlightened social circles today. Catholics say that the Communion hosts they receive at church are literally the flesh of Christ, that when they go to confession a profound reconciliation occurs between man and God, far beyond just a cathartic venting session. They believe that people in heaven are aware of what goes on here on earth, and that they pray for us. And—a fact that I’d known for days but whose relevance was just occurring to me now—they believe that the process of baptism contains real power.

A tingling sensation rippled under my skin. I suddenly wondered if my deceased grandfather might be very much alive, even present in a certain sense. I wondered if the baptism that he and my grandmother encouraged to happen would be of some assistance to me, though I couldn’t imagine how. I wondered if he had been praying for me all this time—if he was perhaps praying for me right now.

My mom said she was glad we talked, and she stood to leave. I was so dazed, I barely muttered a goodbye. I sat alone in the room for a while longer, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that there could be powerful, unseen forces at work in my life that I’d never known were there.