Page 309 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 297

“Priests are not doctors.”
“They said I made myself nervous.”
“Darling,” she said deliberately, sitting up, “you didn’t leave the
seminary. You left the Dark Ages.”
I could touch this worldchild. Grace could still work through
me. She could introduce me to the world, and I her to heaven. Oh,
God, shut me fub duck up. Spinning, falling, rising, lying, hoping,
begging, pretending, faking, wanting to fall into all the troubles of
the flesh, the glories, sitting cross-legged, containing myself, want-
ing not knowing what, everything, from her.
“You’re positively Gothic,” she said. “At least you’re making
yourself up.” She rose. “We had an ex-seminarian up here to dinner
last week. He acted like we were going to rape him. He sat there, on
the couch, right on the edge, his knees together.” She lit a cigarette.
“I guess he thought he ought to go out with the girls. Priests are such
boys, such...virgins.” She smiled at me, really smiled, looking for all
the world like everything I’d never seen. “Care for another drink?”
she asked. I heard every apple in Eden fall.
I pushed my package of Southern Comfort towards her. “It’s a
house gift.”
“Thanks,” she said, “wine’s my limit. Yours too. Stand up.” She
poured the wine into our glasses. “Can you manage the stereo? I’ve
stacked six or seven LPs. You know how to manage the stereo, don’t
you? You lift the arm, set it on the lip of record, and make sure the
needle rides on into the groove.”
“Lauren Bacall. To Have and Have Not.”
She kissed her finger and put her finger to my lips.
I dropped the record already set on her phono graph, and turned
up the low, surging Mikis Theodorakis’ soundtrack to the movie,
Phaedra, so popular at the Bryn Mawr theater, crashing violins,
deliberate picking guitars, soothing, the huge crisp black-and-white
faces of Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins and Raf Vallone
playing Aristotle Onassis erasing the faces of Karg and Gunn and
all the priests and all the sweet, sweet nuns.
Melina Mercouri’s deep voice, silken as cigarette smoke curling
around grape leaves, saying over the music track to Tony Perkins,
“Falcon of the cold north. Eagle of solitude. I give you milk and

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