Page 197 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 185

“vitamin-enriched” because they were supposed to be good for us. I
had hopes for each movie, but the priests succeeded in making every
viewing a season in purgatory.
When we once saw a movie about convicts watching a movie in
prison, the movie prisoners acted the same way toward the screen we
did. I laughed out loud. I knew the screen was a mirror. I realized
that whatever was on screen was really about life, the way novels and
plays and art were really about life.
Some times the movie provoked discus sion after wards, with
all the boys standing in hallways, the older boys smoking one last
cigarette in the last few minutes before night prayers and the Grand
Silence.
After every movie, Father Gunn stood outside the auditorium,
cross-armed, ill at ease, trapped like a watchdog in the hall, forced
to make small talk.
“You really picked a doozie this time, Father.” Keith Fahnhorst,
the best wrestler in the history of Misericordia, had liked the month’s
only feature, The Long Gray Line, a drama about an Irish coach’s life
at West Point Military Academy. Parts of the movie mirrored Misery
perfectly. “But a couple scenes might have been a little too much for
the high-school boys,” Keith Fahnhorst said, “where Tyrone Power
and Maureen O’Hara were kissing and then sat in bed and talked.”
Gunn frowned, recrossed his arms, half-smiled. Uncomfortable.
He’d seen the film a few summers before on the ship when he sailed
to Europe to visit the Vatican and he certainly hadn’t recalled the
marital scenes, which had not seemed suggestive to him on the high
seas. He was, he said, embar rassed to have exposed tender minds
to such emo tions. “But the scene where Maureen O’Hara died,” he
said, “with the rosary in her hand, right there on the West Point
grounds was excuse enough for the emotional exposure.”
My God, I thought, my God. That movie was approved for
family viewing by the National Legion of Decency and these priests
carry on like these kids don’t see and do far more when they go
home for the summer. “Here comes the double standard again,” I
whis pered to Lock. He laughed.
“What was that, O’Hara?” Gunn asked. “You aren’t related to
Maureen O’Hara, are you?”

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