Page 212 - What They Did to the Kid

200 Jack Fritscher

river, over the blowing trees, and up the windy hill. I could dare the
spring rain and wait till the very last minute, the very last second, to
pull my window closed. The edge of the storm hit, pounded pellets
on the glass, washed down the beautiful May twilight. The sky grew
orange when the front passed. Behind the clouds, the sun had set,
leaving us all bathed in the trailing after light.
Outdoors, arm in arm, two quartets of boys stood in lamp light,
sheltered under the stone vault of an entrance stairs, catching the
echo, harmonizing German lieder and the sweet, sweet air from
Fiorello, “Twilight descends, everything ends, till tomorrow.” Out
on the wet walkways, other seminarians strolled back and forth,
and forth and back, cassocks snapping like windsocks about their
ankles, talking shop, they called it, smoking, and waiting for the
call to rosary. I did not follow them to chapel. Out of self-defense.
By the Irish Jesuit’s orders, I took a vanishing powder. Now you
see me. Now you don’t. I disappeared for nearly five weeks into an
underground of my own making. In theology lectures, I perfected
a look of attention while I read novels under the priestly noses of
ancient professors droning on about the Council of Trent and the
horrors of Albigensian heresy. I filed with the boys into chapel often
enough to keep up appearances. This too on Jesuit orders.
The crowd of five hundred seminarians and priests praying in
unison, alternating the responses of the rosary in the dark, the beau-
tiful hum of religious male voices chanting code, or spinning at
Mass in rich vestments swirling in pirouettes of liturgy and clouds
of incense, stole not my breath away, but my credulity. Ritual was
surface. What was the secret behind it? What were they really up to?
Among so many seminarians, all dressed in black, hair cut in
flat-tops, my withdrawal from their subjectivity to my objectivity, as
a spy on them and on myself, went unnoticed. In the huge confor-
mity, even Rector Karg had trouble keeping track of who was absent
from morning prayers and mass; from chapel visits after breakfast,
before lunch, after lunch, and after supper; from rosary; and finally
from night prayers.
Rosary ended. I sat in the dark in my nine-by-twelve- foot room.
I listened to the thudding lockstep of hundreds of boys marching
silently from chapel, reluctantly turning into their rooms for the last

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