Page 224 - What They Did to the Kid

212 Jack Fritscher

“Then you know this man has been afflicted?”
“I heard he was not well.”
“You knew it was not physical?”
“He was physically sick quite a lot when he was here. I thought
perhaps he was a little emotional.”
“You know what is wrong with him?”
“No, Rector. What is it?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, Rector.”
“I won’t say.”
“Say what, Rector?”
“If you are innocent, your innocence will protect you.”
Suddenly, something unspoken leapt up in the room.
Rector Karg pulled himself up to his giant size. “Are you like
him, boy? Are you like him?”
Dick Dempsey was nothing but innocence when he was at Mis-
ery and so nervous he wet the bed and was often in the infirmary,
absent from class. I knew nothing unspoken about him. But every-
one else knew. All of them, I bet, Lock included. Their goddam
community. It was some strange Christian charity, all right, that
kept them from telling me. Just because we had been friends. They
told me only enough to make me feel a priestly responsibility to reach
out to a friend in distress. How could I tell that to this assassin? How
could I tell him an unmailed letter dated two months previously,
written in hopes of the openness of Vatican II, had not been mailed
because in the tension between the call of charity and the call to
obedience to the holy rule, the rule had won out.
“Are you like him, boy? Are you?”
“No, Rector.”
I did not lie. I was not like Dick Dempsey. I was not like that at
all. Sean O’Malley, S. J., told me I was “maybe a wee bit soft from
seminary living,” but he thought I was “not like that at all, not at all,
at all.” O’Malley had asked me, “When you draw pictures of boys,
are they erect or not?”
I was shocked. “I don’t draw pictures of boys.”
Suddenly Rector Karg slapped my records closed and terminated
the interview. “We’ll meet again tomorrow. You have placed me in a

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