Page 136 - What They Did to the Kid

124 Jack Fritscher

Maybe he was jealous. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for him. Maybe
he wanted to be the only priest in our family.
I loved the rich medieval life of study, prayer, and work. But
each Septem ber, I grew mourn fully home sick. By Novem ber, my
longing for the summer turned into eager expecta tion of Christmas.
My vocation, after all, was not to live in a seminary boarding school,
but to be a parish priest working in the world. The seminary was
a test of worthiness. So I diverted my agonizing for the world into
tightly scheduled classes, exams, prayer, play, and work. I could only
become a model priest by learning how to be the ideal seminarian. I
never pitched a softball game where I didn’t mean every pitch as an
ideal pitch. Every class of the twenty-six hours a semester I aimed
for the highest grade.
The silent priests, hands tucked up their sleeves, treated us ever
harder, ever tougher, running Misery as a spiritual boot camp to
make us earn our vocations. We had dues to pay. We were soldiers of
Christ. Our goal lay in a most desired Jesus. Time and self-disci pline
were keys to success. So I kept climbing, each bright new Septem ber,
back into the gladiator arena to witness to Christ that I was strong
enough to be buffeted by other boys, educated by distant priests, and
clever enough to survive to my Ordination Day.
Mike set my suitcases at the door to my room. If ever a seminar-
ian crossed so much as the toe of a shoe over the threshold of another
boy’s room, he was shipped. Mike stood the required six inches back
from my door so his whole body could be seen down the length of
the hall.
“I’m glad,” I said, “that you came back.”
He said, “Yeah,” and left me in my room.
The desk and the bed smelled not yet of me, but of the institu-
tion closed in antiseptic quarantine upon itself for the summer
months. I piled clothes into my drawers, vowing to keep the white
underwear stacked neat, knowing the reality that I was not the kind
of boy whose socks ever stayed tucked away in tidy rows. My voca-
tion absolute ly needed the priests’ discipline. To be alone at Misery
for four months, with theater and lectures and concerts suspended;
to be lacerated like the old monks with disci pline, and worse than

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