Page 206 - What They Did to the Kid

194 Jack Fritscher

“Good. It’s an indulgence and indulgences aren’t good for the
young. I smoke.”
I wanted to say, “You’re not young. You’re forty.” But I didn’t.
I thought he might laugh, think it humorous, and be yet another
priest who every time I tried to talk with him held me off with a joke.
I didn’t need another punster who saw two meanings to words but
only one meaning to life. I hoped as mysteriously as this Irish priest,
whose name was Sean O’Malley, S. J., Society of Jesus, had come to
Misery, just as mysteriously he could help us all.
His predecessor, a pink ancient German priest predilected to
saying hence, till all we could do when he preached was count the
hences, had explained spiritual counseling to me definitively. When
the German Jesuit was more than eighty, and I was only fourteen, he
told me that I’d see him for spiritual guidance once a year and when
I had twelve marks for twelve visits, I would be ordained a priest, and
he’d be nearly a hundred years old. Then he talked about Maumee
in Ohio and how he used to swim there, centuries ago, before the
turnpike ruined everything.
I didn’t want to talk about Maumee then with that old German
Jesuit and I didn’t want to talk about superficialities with the new
Irish one.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
“People and me. And God. I’m almost twenty-four and I’m in
love.”
“With a girl?”
“No.”
“With someone here.”
“Oh no.” I looked at him. “Of course not.”
“Thank God and Saint Patrick. Go on.”
“All last fall semester I thought of coming to see you, but I was
busy. Studies, and editing the Misery newspaper, and sports. After
Christmas vacation I thought I’d procrastinated long enough to have
committed at least a venial sin of omission.”
“Don’t be scrupulous, boy, finding sin where there is none.”
For an older man he had a fresh tone for a priest.
“This is March.” He lit a cigarette. “March first. March fourth.
March forth. A month whose dates are a command to go forward.”

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