Page 187 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 175

We stood looking at the bulletin board. Gunn had tacked up
new specific mimeo graphed rules. He renewed the ban on fiction
books, and, backed by the faculty, stipulat ed only textbooks and
authorized collateral reading in our rooms. Protestant and Jewish
theolo gians, who had crept in during the year, were collected by very
senior boys and locked away in a cage in the library.
“Pogrom,” I said. “Inquisition.” Philosophers like Paul Tillich
and Martin Buber returned underground with the transistor radios.
“Do not ask the ‘I’ for whom the ‘Thou’ tolls.”
“Karg and Gunn are missing the point.” Lock was disgusted.
“Never throw the baby out with the bath water.” He was tearing
up a copy of Sartre which in itself was Sartrean . “Rules of grammar
and laws of theology they under stand, but anything modern proves
they’re more medi eval than this wonderful new Pope.”
“But look at their logic,” I said. “The worst sin has indicted the
whole progress of theology.”
“Vatican II and Father Dryden. Sheer coincidence.”
“Were those priests spying on us all year?” I could imagine Gunn
and Karg rooting through our underwear drawers, flipping through
my notebooks, picking at my treasures in my shoe box. “Dryden
maybe proves them right in their caution.” Many boys’ rooms in the
last twenty-four hours had been ransacked. “Dryden ruined what-
ever he was trying to do.”
“You never liked him,” Lock said. “Ever.”
“He scared me.”
“You’re amazing, Ryan. What is it about you? It’s like you can
smell a sin of impurity at a thousand paces. I’m not sure that’s a
virtue.”
“I hated him, even though he breezed through in a fresh way.”
“Dryden’s ruined everything,” Lock said. “At least because of
him everything’s ruined.”
“He told us,” I said, “about T. S. Eliot, and then he went and did
the wrong thing for what reason I don’t understand.”
In the room, the boys come and go, posing for Michael angelo.
“Rector Karg has acted even worse,” Lock said, “hand ling this
situation with all these gossiping boys. Old-guard priests don’t like
to see the new-guard church replacing them.”

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