Page 137 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 125

they, with loneliness; to be whipped into shape if I could not love my
way to the grace of a vocation.
My tiny room closed in about me. Very Pit. Very Pendulum.
Breathless, I pushed my empty suitcase on the shelf over my bed and
desk. To flee the sinking sense of abandon ment, to flee the panic
of isolation, I left the other suitcase half-packed. I pulled on my
black wool cassock. My body disap peared into the perfectly tailored
shoulders and chest that dropped straight down to my black shoe
tops. Black trumped the colors of the world.
I ran downstairs toward the laughter in the recre ation room.
Ping-pong balls popped back and forth. I shook hands with semi-
narians selling and trading cassocks they had outgrown over the
summer. Lock Roehm had not yet arrived.
Mike sat alone on a window sill with an outdated issue of
Common weal magazine, which was the epitome of the serious Cath-
olic press. He was intense as a Jesuit.
One boy, showing off on a bet to ten boys, stuffed a full pack of
twenty cigarettes in his mouth and lit them all at once, puffing and
huffing and choking to rounds of cheers.
The chatter in the room buzzed around Dick Dempsey and other
missing boys who had dropped out, or whose rumored quitting was
not yet confirmed or denied by their signature, or lack of it, in the
official book sitting on the Reverend Treasurer’s desk at Misery’s
front entrance. Each seminari an competed to be the first to know of
any other who had lost his vocation. The opening-day tension was
electric. Shock wanted. Shock given. For the first day, the missing
boy’s name was gossiped about, wildly , as if some boys had privi leged
informa tion, but in time, mention and memory of him evaporated.
Dick Demp sey was doomed to disappear. He had sent me no
letter, only a picture card of Philadelphia post marked on Labor Day
and signed, “Pax te cum, peace be with you. –Saint Dick.” Always he
played back, as a joke, the boys thinking he was a special kind of
holy saint. We had been best friends, but I’d never know how his
vocation ended.
Rector Karg forbade us, under “consequences worse than the
pains of hell ,” to have any communica tion with former students.
“No letters. No visits. No contact. Nothing. Ever.”

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