Page 205 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 193

cast. Nothing was ever more embarrassing. In the front row of St.
Philomena’s was a small mercy.
Danny Boyle was too busy to laugh at my hand. He was holding
a wiggling infant on his shoulder, trying to hand it off to his wife,
Barbara, with her hands folded on top of another pregnancy under
her cloth coat. A third child, a toddler, clung to Danny Boyle’s leg.
Charlie-Pop asked Father Gerber if my injured hand might dis-
qualify me from Ordination. Father Gerber told him to have my
Uncle Les telephone Rector Karg. Uncle Les told us all to relax.
He was, he said, spending the holidays on vacation in Key West.
My broken finger concerned him less than that for the second New
Year’s in a row he had not been able to go to Cuba since Castro
turned Communist. What a shame, he said, because at first he had
so approved of Castro’s revolution against the Batista government he
felt was irretrievably corrupt.
“But what about my finger?”
“What,” he said, “about Cuba?”

March 17, 1963
Saint Patrick’s Day

The Jesuit priest, our new spiritual director, sat wild and wiry and
full of life behind his desk. He was what Jesuits are supposed to be:
the Marines of the Catholic Church. The huge desk and windows
dwarfed him. He was Irish, of the redheaded and strong kind, a
drinker and a smoker, sitting in a rolling blue cloud of smoke. A
large ashtray, half-full of butts, lay under his tapping fingers. The
toasted smell of his cigarettes saturated the room. He had lived in
this suite at Misery only four months, and his bright, freckled, fear-
less personality lit up the room.
“Ryan Steven O’Hara. What’s a Mick like you doing in a semi-
nary full of Krauts?”
“Father, we pay no attention to that. We’re all American boys,
Catholic boys.”
“Do you smoke?” he asked.
“No, Father.”

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