Page 239 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 227

doors or not. So much for priestly providence. They had a life of their
own. For minutes, hours, years the world was down there before
me. I could not hold back the joy of the day. O my God! I turned,
ran back into the choir loft around the organ, down all the marble
stairs, throwing open the doors, wanting to run across the porch
to be down with them on the lawn, walking among them, almost
touching the women in wild hats that floated over everything. I ran
for the main foyer, my heart hurting, pumping beneath my cassock,
trying nonchalance, weaving upstream among the guests working
their way from the church to the front garden.
They walked, stood, milled about, talking, congratulating,
hugging, eager to spy out the halls of Misery where their sons and
brothers had spent twelve secret years of youth. Their laughter rang
liquid down the marble corridors, banked against the stone walls,
and echoed back like ripples on water over stones. I pushed through
them easily. Excuse-me, excuse-me, hello, congratulations, excuse-me.
An Italian family caught me up, bellissimo and ciao, and we all spun
out onto the porch blinking like babies strollered suddenly into the
sun. Other families, mostly German, some Irish—all Americans—
mixed in and we were all swept down the steps, to the lawn, in the
May. Together. Italian and German and as my parents both said,
“Irish and Catholic, thank God!”
Life poured into my very being. Senses glutting, digesting. Soul
expanding like a sponge in sweet deep water. I, among them, mov-
ing, smiling, seeing, hardly being seen, listening, nodding, smiling,
feeling, leaping nearly, wanting to reach out, touch, grasp all to me
to protect them, to save them, to lock them all forever into their
happiness.
My own mother was thrilled at the prospect of being known as
the mother of a priest. My own father counted the days until he was
the father of a priest.
Sun soaked deep into the black wool of my cassock. I felt like
David Niven in Around the World in Eighty Days, floating in a bal-
loon high above the world, watching out for it, landing on a white
bench among the shade trees where three little girls in Sunday dresses
played hide-and-seek.
“Ryan,” Lock called. “Come here.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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