Page 286 - What They Did to the Kid

274 Jack Fritscher

In February I came from the family limbo of Peoria, north, to a new
life in a new school in a new city. I met Joe and Louisa Bunchek in
the Chicago Sun-Times classifieds. They provided board and an attic
room for twenty dollars a week near the Loyola University Lakeshore
Campus. They were real and suited my mood. They let me alone at
first, only expressing wonder at all the books I had moved in for my
first semester in graduate school.
“Those Jesuits at Loyola,” they said, “sure make you crack the
books.”
They introduced me to visiting company, even on my way
through their kitchen to the bathroom, as a seminarian.
“The last two boarders were in the seminary too,” Louisa
reminded her guests who were all relatives. “God must sure think
we need watching over.”
Everyone smiled as I disappeared into the toilet. Someone was
always coming and going at the Buncheks. They lay in wait outside
the bathroom to stare at me, glowing like a holy picture, when I
came out.
Alone in the kitchen, sitting with Louisa Bunchek, I felt she was
racier than any woman I’d ever known. Night fell fast in deep winter
in Chicago’s Rogers Park. I liked her.
Outside the back door, across Sheridan Avenue, closed by the
loveliest blizzard in the world, I watched a lone woman sit reading
in the ornamented glass ticket booth, frosted like an igloo, under
the bright marquee of the Sheridan movie theater. Sometimes I’d
call her, watch her look up, bored, as her phone rang, and, invisible,
across the drifting distance of the frozen night, I’d ask her what time
the next feature began.
The forbidden Cleopatra was playing out our back door, across
the snowy street. Inside the huge movie palace, one ticket made
winter into Egypt with Liz Taylor repeating, two showings a day,
“Now will I begin a dream of my own.” Twice a day, Richard Bur-
ton’s Antony announced, “The ultimate desertion. Me from myself.”
Signs and omens were everywhere.
Loyola Campus lay frozen, covered with snow, on the icy banks
of Lake Michigan. The muffled city shimmered in streetlight and
moonlight and starlight.

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