Page 256 - What They Did to the Kid

244 Jack Fritscher

I bolted up and stood in front of the one luxury in the room
that had, in the better days of the parish, been the second house-
keeper’s quarters, a three-quarter-length mirror. I took off my shoes
and socks and shirt and slacks and underwear. I dared stand naked.
White and naked and more naked than white. Blind parents raise
invisible child. Another invisible boy turning into another invisible
man. In the summer suddenly, I could die like Schwerner, Chaney,
and Goodman, virgin-martyr-saints of civil rights. The shell of my
outside was new, forbidden. I looked at every part of it.
Except for the unseen soul inside, corpus meum, my body could
have been any young white man’s body, naked, downed downy
with Irish down, passably athletic. Inside me is me. Outside is me
too. Ridiculously obvious. But meaning much more. My body a
metaphor of the veil between me and all the world. Pushing tongue
against the permanent gold bridge backing my perfect white teeth.
For years when I was a child, men spoke to me as a child. Paralleling
Saint Paul, I put away the childish things and men spoke to me as a
seminarian. The second state little different from the first. Child and
seminarian. Seminarian and child. Childseminarian. The darkling
umbra penumbra of labels. I had always handled myself well without
ever touching myself. Without interfering with myself. I stared into
the mirror.
For years, no one had seen me. I only that night stopped to look
at the white dummy from the front row. “Child of God,” I said. “I
am that they see, but they’ve never seen me.” Never seen me: Ryan
O’Hara, Person. A young person. Trust in Jesus. Trussed in Jesus and
Rector Karg and Father Gunn, because they went lickety-lickety, the
way James Earl Jones could in his “Old Man River” basso profundo
intone lickety-lickety, wagging their pious fingers, saying I could have
no crisis, no growth, nothing but the innocence of my childhood
from which I was to come to them perfect, remain untroubled, and
survive without blemish.
Blue sheet lightning crashed off in the night. Hopefully a bit to
the west, over the Iowa plains, striking the birthplace of Rector Karg,
and burning it down.
Misericordia didn’t give an inch for any bent to the normal ado-
lescent crises of the very adoles cence it protracted. I was shocked

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK