Page 186 - What They Did to the Kid

174 Jack Fritscher

grand piano, a high-school boy with four thumbs and nine fingers
substituted for the missing priest.
The next morning, the old priest sitting guard outside Dryden’s
suite was gone. The chair was empty. Hank dared knock and push
on the door. He came running back to our class room. “It’s locked,”
he said. “There’s no sound. It’s like no one’s there.”
“They’ve martyred him,” Ski said. “Behind our backs, they’ve
martyred him sure.”
Lock looked at me dramatically, as if to say, Oh God. Rector
Karg had privately informed him and Mike that, last evening during
the concert, about the time the dearly departing PeterPeterPeter was
transfiguring his way through the “Ave Maria,” Father Dryden had
been cornered in his apartment, buckled into a straightjacket, and
driven off to an institution. They were to tell no one, but they told
me about his complete nervous breakdown. They put him in the
booby hatch tied up next to Russell Rainforth.
The next four days were final examinations. The tension caused
by the mystery of the missing priest raised conjecture to a fever pitch.
Ski made a candle-lit shrine out of a can of Dryden’s tennis balls
you’d have thought were third-class relics. In a closed communi ty
where everyone knew everyone else’s business, for once no one had
anything right.
“This is being handled very badly,” Lock said.
“What exactly is a nervous breakdown?” I asked, genuinely,
because I had long feared I might have one.
“A nervous breakdown is what people say you have,” Lock said,
“when you don’t agree with them.”
“And,” Mike said, “when they can’t get rid of you any other way.”
Mike’s mother and father, Julia and Doc, always said his sister
had a nervous breakdown.
“Sometimes what you have,” Lock said, “is a nervous
breakthrough.”
“A nervous anything,” I said, “can cost a priest his vocation.”
“Wrong,” Lock said. “A vocation is a personal calling from God.
Lots of men have vocations to the priesthood, but not everyone
answers, or is allowed to answer.”
“You think Christopher Dryden has a vocation?” I asked.

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