Page 101 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 89

who all seemed like they were having forbidden special friendships,
always together, the way Father Polistina—who could have caught
mystical fire for all I cared—never went anywhere without Father
Yovan, who taught theology, and had a giant body topped with a
head even so much more giant he seemed deformed, even though he
was overall very handsome. As if the priesthood itself weren’t eleva-
tion enough, Hank’s crowd wanted to be monsignors and bishops
and cardinals, and Porky had wanted to be pope.
Actually, what is a vocation, but making the improbable probable?
God told me I had a vocation.
I told people God told me that and they all believed me.
As those years in Misery’s high-school department changed into
four years in Misery’s college department, doors opened and closed.
Many boys quit. Many more boys were shipped out. The priests
were shaping the next generation of clergy. Some boys like Hank
the Tank began to work the church-strings that would set them up
for the four last years in Misery’s theology department, and then in
their diocese for life.
One older seminarian, everyone knew, had already played his
cards right. He’d be a grand priest, they all said, a very young bishop,
and an astounding American cardinal, called to Rome itself, and
he’d be a boy from Misery. I understood his ambition, but I had
studied his face and wondered under his impeccable grooming what
was his secret heart.
We all knew how to reach Ordination to the priesthood, but I
wondered about our personal identity and our individual integrity,
and who that older seminarian really was behind the pose, the mask,
the vestments, the incense, the music, the candles, the lighting, the
architecture.
Hank’s clerical ambition seemed to me to be a worldly vanity,
because he was the kind of boy who, having survived public disgrace,
could only rebuild himself up by tearing other boys down. In the
end, I figured, even a priest had to confront his human heart.

June 6, 1957

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