Page 302 - What They Did to the Kid

290 Jack Fritscher

So Louisa didn’t know about Jocelyn Jennings. She was a profes-
sional graduate student. Her course work completed, she was in the
sixth year of the seven maximum allowed to write a dissertation.
Hers happened to be on Virginia Woolf, who had drowned herself
twenty years before. Jocelyn had bussed her torso into college from
Jamestown, New York. She specialized in taking new graduate stu-
dents down to a cellar jukebox bar on Rush Street to twist to Chubby
Checker, and frug to Ramsey Lewis’ “I’m ‘In’ with the In Crowd,”
and slow-dance to Ray Charles records, “I Can’t Stop Loving You”
and “Ruby (You’re Like a Song).”
One night, in the group of us, she took a pen from her bag, wrote
something, leaned into me, and said, “Phone me.”
I did, because hers was the first phone number I received, and
she was editor of the graduate school literary magazine.
“You could get me published,” I said, “for the first time outside
the Catholic press.”
“Did you notice you’re in a Jesuit university?” she said. “Every-
thing here is the Catholic press.” She was something extraordinary
among all the other well-bred girls and their blond beehive hairdos.
She was tall, thin, and mysterious. Her long curlicue black hair flew
loose, wild, around her face. In an instant, she could change, pull-
ing her hair back and piling it on top her head like the women in
ancient Greece, and behind her head, like Virginia Woolf herself in
the photographs she had clipped from British magazines.
She was perfect for Rush Street and Old Town, where she lived
at 60 East Chicago, Apartment 403, a block from the Water Tower,
and a block from the Lawson Y. Many students hived together in
tiny apartments. Artists and musicians and underground filmmak-
ers hung out at the bars and coffee shops and the Russian tea room
and the Cinematheque which, she told everyone, was always getting
busted by the police, because the Chicago Film Review Board were
all the widows of cops and politicians. She was a presence in the
Student Union cafeteria, something like Urania, the earth mother,
with her special chair at a special table. Everyone in graduate school
seemed to know her, nod to her, suck up to her. I kept my distance
at first.
We were like one of those old big-band songs of the 1940’s where

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