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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK174 Jack FritscherMy very panic was caused by expecting that God should be speaking to me, whispering reassurances about my vocation in my ear. Why was God apparently using semaphore flags to tell them to be canon lawyers, dragging their rich vestments down the halls of bishop%u2019s mansions, when He wasn%u2019t even speaking to me? The panic grew worse when I recalled that only saints heard voices, well, saints and crazy people. So, knowing I wasn%u2019t a saint, and estimating that I wasn%u2019t yet crazy, I should have been happy I wasn%u2019t hearing God%u2019s voice.I wanted to hear what the other boys heard, but I didn%u2019t really want to hear the voices of the boys themselves, because, as they grew more mature, many of those German farmers%u2019 sons became hard silent dour athletic sergeants on the Misery construction crew, or worse, porky gossiping biddies singing along with opera on stereo recordings in the community room where they auditioned boys with perfect enough pitch and graceful enough hands to be picked as cantors leading Gregorian chant in chapel.The seminary was an institution, but I could not surrender to institutionalization. I thought a priestly vocation was a personal calling. I had found, vague as it was, a tempest of self that needed protecting. I%u2019d be content, as Sean O%u2019Malley, S. J., had asked me, to be a wee assistant priest in a wee parish in a wee town, living the wee hidden life of the Carpenter Himself.%u201cYou missed the comedy after supper,%u201d Lock said. %u201cDown by the kitchen, Alfred Doney was sitting naked in his room, painting by numbers, and everybody stopped in the stairwell. You could see right in. The jackals in our class thought it was hilarious.%u201d Lock leaned casually against my door.The Doneys, mother and son, worked in the kitchen. She really had mother love to come to a place like Misery to be able to keep him with her. Alfred had a syndrome and looked like Mickey Rooney. He could have been any age, short, with vacant pink rabbit eyes and a high-pitched voice. His hair was cut under a bowl like a medieval monk. Mrs. Doney was as small as he, far older, with a shock of steel gray hair also chopped like a monk. She was sharp and but for Alfred would have taken the first bus out, migrating to some trailer park down among some sheltering palms in Sarasota or Phoenix. We were not allowed to speak to the lay help, especially this one female, but Mrs. Doney repeated within all earshot, loud enough and often enough for the dead to hear, that for us boys she had given up on ever having her sunglasses, her beautician%u2019s rinse, and her Mai Tai. I thought she blamed us for what she could not blame Alfred, whose room was filled with paint-by-numbers.