Page 284 - What They Did to the Kid

272 Jack Fritscher

snapshots, First Blessing of a newly ordained priest, her son. The
greatest thing a woman can be: the mother of a priest. Oh him. What
about him? All her hopes become luggage shoved back into a closet
because of a splendid trip that would never begin.
Oh gone! Oh Adonai. Gone from me, I took the dream from
them. No chance of home movies. No 8mm Technicolor Ordina-
tion Day. I was steady as a beam of light through a pinhole in an
eclipse. An apocalypse. To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of
all the western stars, until I die. I sit tonight without my lord, uh,
without my bucko, without my Jack, in eternal November’s eternal
Friday. Oh, everyone. Take me as me. Veils stripped away. Be thou
my vision, so unlike other men. Flags go up the mast, up from half-
mast, to forget, to forget. The first weeks of all the weeks of the world
that must pass without him.
I want to go to the sea he loved. To see the clouds scud along the
sky of Martha’s Vineyard, wind whipping gulls to flight, to watch
one impossibly white bird rocket up like a jet, becoming smaller and
smaller till eyes ache to see the white spot in the pale flat sky.
Press the liquor from the loss into a cider’s cup of meaning.
Guinevere mourns. “Roe O’Neill. Sheep without a shepherd, when
the snow shuts out the sky. Oh why did you leave us? Why did you
die?”
Oh world. Oh litany of lost people, bleached girls with tight-
lipped smiles hiding braces feather-dusting cosmetics in drugstores.
Acne-boys under sudden mop-top hair and jeans and boots trying
to be strong, smoking. Bald-headed men with lunch spots on their
ties and old women who dress too young. Poor world. Life. Lost so
long in the bowels of the Church. Ancient priests slipping down the
drains of ancient corridors. How come to world, me, him gone. One
world abandoned. I excess.
Sitting with Annie Laurie and Charlie-Pop watching the new
nineteen-inch black-and-white screen after New Year’s. Jack Ken-
nedy lived and died on black-and-white TV. On television, every-
body faking Christmas joy that this year cannot trump grief. My
parents, me, the whole country, like the 1930’s Broadway Baby belt-
ing it out, proving she’s still got It, then life goes on. Ethel Merman
brought to you by Ford Automobiles. Gee, but it’s good to be here!

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