Page 246 - What They Did to the Kid

234 Jack Fritscher

brother, can I tell. They’re all kind of wrapped up in the old religious
womb. Singing some prosy, rosy prayer of semiconscious ness. Look
at them!” She chain-lit another cigarette. Smoke enveloped her face.
She didn’t smell as if she’d been drinking. “And you, priest, dear,
you’re the same. Just older, not wiser.”
Cyril Prosper looked at her, amazed, his cool, priestly suavity
almost swept from him. “Miss? Miss? I’m sorry I...”
“Mrs. Berrengar.” She waved her ring in his face. “Mrs. Ber-
rengar, the younger. As opposed to Mrs. Berrengar, the older and
uglier, the mother of my husband, Big Chuckie, who probably only
loves me, Big Edie, because he’s afraid not to. Tell me, priest. Priests.
Priests and priestlings. How to cope with that. You’re supposed to
know all about love and marriage. Your guns all unshot under all
those skirts. Your bodies may be virgins, but your minds are fucked.”
Violent, smoking, ugly standing there, she made me feel hot
and moving, wanting to mate with her, throwing her to the damp
filthy straw of some medieval lodging. The summer before I’d split
the back of my head water-skiing and told the barber to be careful,
be careful of it, and he, not knowing me a seminarian, presumed,
“She slugged you, huh?” She could have, Edith could have, stand-
ing smoking, could have been the one if ever one was to be the first
one to knock me senseless, and it would have been more pure than
impure.
“I went to Confession two months ago,” she said, “and I asked
the priest a question and told him my opinions about marriage and
sex. He asked me what I’d been reading. I told him de Chardin.”
“You read Teilhard de Chardin?” I was amazed.
“Shut up, Ryan,” Lock said.
“Anything you can read I can read,” she said. “Anyway, do you
know what this Father Abortionado said to me? ‘My daughter,’ he
called me—imagine!–‘we should be wary of the pride that makes
us attempt intellectual pursuits beyond our capacity. De Chardin,’
he was telling me off, ‘tries impossibly to marry biblical doctrine to
theories of evolution. We must leave theological speculation to the
experts and be content with the simple definitions of Holy Mother
Church.’ I gagged, really gagged. I wanted to say, oh, you stupid,

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