Page 184 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK172 Jack Fritscherheresy. I filed with the boys into chapel often enough to keep up appearances. This too on Jesuit orders.The crowd of five hundred seminarians and priests praying in unison, alternating the responses of the rosary in the dark, the beautiful hum of religious male voices chanting code, or spinning at Mass in rich vestments swirling in pirouettes of liturgy and clouds of incense, stole not my breath away, but my credulity. Ritual was surface. What was the secret behind it? What were they really up to?Among so many seminarians, all dressed in black, hair cut in flat-tops, my withdrawal from their subjectivity to my objectivity, as a spy on them and on myself, went unnoticed. In the huge conformity, even Rector Karg had trouble keeping track of who was absent from morning prayers and mass; from chapel visits after breakfast, before lunch, after lunch, and after supper; from rosary; and finally from night prayers.Rosary ended. I sat in the dark in my nine-by-twelve-foot room. I listened to the thudding lockstep of hundreds of boys marching silently from chapel, reluctantly turning into their rooms for the last study period, slamming doors. A tap sounded lightly on my door. I didn%u2019t answer. Always some trickster, in a tiptoe sprint down the hallway, knocked once on fifty doors causing fifty boys to break from their studies, open their doors, and all have a good ape laugh. The tap came again. The door edged open a crack. A figure was backlit by a sliver of hallway light. %u201cFriend or foe?%u201d I asked.%u201cRyan, you awake?%u201d It was Lock.I grunted.%u201cWhere are you?%u201d%u201cOver here by the window.%u201d%u201cWhy so dark in there?%u201d Lock reached only his hand into my room and flipped the switch to the overhead light. My windowful of wonderful twilight dissolved into a mirror reflecting me sitting in my room, desk and bed and wash sink, cassocks and black corduroys and white T-shirts neatly folded, a piece of driftwood Dick Dempsey had given me carved so subtly Rector Karg could never accuse me of collecting art, books all over, spilled, purposely spilled, with theology and philosophy books prominently strewn, hiding almost in plain sight the forbidden novels and plays from the secret library of Sean O%u2019Malley, S. J., who claimed his own father had met James Joyce, in fact, had bought James Joyce himself a drink in a pub. %u201cAnother sinus headache?%u201d %u201cYeah.%u201d Nobody%u2019s sinuses could act up so much, but Lock was kind.