Page 225 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 213

delicate situation of conscience. I must pray over this.” He stood up
to his full height in the big room of big furniture and big walls. “Tell
me. How many other rules have you broken? I have confiscated your
so-called literature books. I suppose you have a transistor radio.”
I didn’t say, “Every single seminarian has one.” I didn’t say,
“Couldn’t you find it?” I simply promised to surrender my only con-
nection to music and the news within the hour.
“Give the radio to Father Gunn,” he said. “We shall have to
confer much about you. Your status is extremely precarious. We may
have to ship you, boy. I suspect you may have lost your vocation. “
“Thank you, Rector,” I said, “for your kindness.” And screw you.
I was in mortal danger. My soul and heart and intellect left my body
and I watched myself walk out of his suite. Oh dear God, protect
me. I went directly to my Jesuit, who to that moment had been only
my spiritual director and not my confessor.
“Let me hear your Confession,” Sean O’Malley, the clever priest
from the clever Society of Jesus, said, and sealed his lips with the seal
of the Confessional forever.
I confessed misdemeanors of the radio, and venial sins of unkind
thoughts about Rector Karg, and how one time I had stood for
three hours inside the tiny cupboard where the priests locked up
their television so I could watch the Academy Awards. I confessed
the same venial sins I confessed twice a week very Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons waiting in the long lines of boys standing in the
chapel at the curtains of a dozen Confessionals. I really and in truth
had never committed a mortal sin in thought or word or deed. That
was my ironic, intellectual problem: without knowledge of sin, how
would I ever grow up emotionally and know anything about life in
the world?
I was not like any boy at all.
I became even more fierce in my self-defense.
For a week Rector Karg, Father Gunn, and Sean O’Malley, S.
J., rummaged about in my life. I pictured us all sitting at a round
poker table covered with green felt, each one fitted with an eyeshade.
I held my cards close. I was playing for my spiritual life, my soul, and
my vocation. The Jesuit played by proxy; because of his privileged
knowledge as my spiritual confessor, he could not talk directly to

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