Page 209 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 197

cassock. I actually felt better. I believed in the craft of Jesuits over
ordinary priests. I had dared express myself to a complete stranger. I
was a twenty-three-year-old boy and he was a grown-up. Adult help
was at hand, even if he was in the FBI of the Foreign-Born Irish
priests working in the States.
I went straight to my room and impulsively wrote a short letter
to the long-departed Dick Dempsey. Word had come back through
the grapevine that he was sick. The implication was he had a...drum-
roll...nervous breakdown. I thought Dempsey and I had been so
alike, I had a vague fear that if Misery made something go wrong
with him, the same thing might go wrong with me. I wanted to get
in touch, to be of some help; but even Vatican II had not quite loos-
ened the ban against writing, under pain of expulsion, to any former
students. So I took the letter, reluctant to let go of my concern for
my former friend, signed it whimsically, “Yours truly, Untouched by
Human Hands, Raised by Monkeys,” and folded the note paper in
a kind of silly ritual, and obediently filed it away in my shoe box of
historical treasures, knowing I’d never see him again.
Work clears the head. I resolved to stretch my capacity. Once
again, the sympathetic older priest, who was himself a writer, hired
me at ten cents a page to translate a second volume of Bernard
Häring’s German moral theology book. The practice at being a
working-priest distracted me from the abstract thing I could not
grasp.
The first day after the nine-day novena to Our Lady of Knock,
actually four days before the two weeks to the next appointment
with the Jesuit, I pounded on his door. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream.
I simply sat down in his chair and tore page after page out of my
copy of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica while I sang the
blues and he stared at me.
“You’ve got the Irish flu,” Sean O’Malley, S. J., said.
“What?”
“Most fellas think the Irish flu is drink. Truth be told: it’s
depression.”
“I’m not depressed. This place is depressing.”
He gave me a bottle of pills.
I was turning into Russell Rainforth.

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