Page 247 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 235

stupid old fool, wasn’t Holy Mother Church ever a girl? I haven’t
been to Confession since. I’ll go again. But I haven’t been since.”
“He was probably one of the older clergy,” Cyril Prosper said.
“Some of them don’t understand the new Church too well.”
“They better,” Big Edie said. “They bloody well better. Chris-
tamighty. I won’t, I won’t be part of their scapular-kissing, medal-
jangling crowd. And you! Kid! What’s the matter with you? You’re
young. What’s going on? How do they do it? How do they do it to
you? How do you do it? Is it some course they teach you here? How
do you learn to go around reducing ordinary good people to gibber-
ing idiots? Why do you do it?”
I was quiet before her because she sounded somehow right and
I knew she was more right than kooky, though vocationally I was
unable to agree with her. But she was right, crazy right. Next to us,
all around on every side, on this very Alice-in-Wonderland lawn,
the power play was happening. The Bishop had shooed the black-
cassocked faculty out among the colorful crowd to play their roles
as priests. Visitors, grown and successful men, disintegrated into the
masks of what they were in high school when confronted by clergy
in authority. The visitors shuffled, looking at their shoes, laughing
at anything or ready to, because good Catholics always laughed at
priests’ jokes. I wondered what they really thought.
“And sex!” She raised her voice. Several faces panned politely
shocked and amused toward us. “If the clergy knew anything about
sex. There’s such a gap between you and we marrieds...”
“...us marrieds.” I found myself editing her.
“Ryan!” Cyril Prosper called my name.
“Why is it,” Big Edie said, “that any Catholic boy who fears he’s
not very masculine thinks it a sign of a vocation? Christamighty,
who knows where vocations come from? How they get here?”
“You certainly think a lot,” Cyril Prosper said.
Lock and I laughed.
“You’re charmed, aren’t you,” Big Edie said to Cyril Prosper. “I’m
so charming. I’m everything you gave up. Ain’t you lucky!”
She was nothing like the nuns and aunts I’d spied earlier in the
day from the choir loft. I hated this ugly jaundiced girl. I hated her
because she had brought to flower in herself cynical seeds I had

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