Page 312 - What They Did to the Kid

300 Jack Fritscher

“the world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers; little we see in Nature that is ours.”
On the lonely sands of Edgewater Beach, where Lake Michigan
rolled up to the neighborhood of apartments where I looked for
rooms to rent, no girl dappled with sun rose from the waves. I was
doomed to innocence. No sweet girl would ever appear. I’d stayed
too long at Misery, and she had become lost, or impatient, or what-
ever happens to women whom priests’ celibacy declines. At least
Lock, one New Year’s when he was in Cuba, had a real choice when
a woman had said to him, “Give me an hour with you in a room
and I’ll change your mind about being a priest.” After eleven years,
I had nothing.
I had been Seduced and Abandoned, the title of the Italian movie
at the Bryn Mawr. That’s what movie Hank would have said I was.
Maybe I was lucky. In California, in some Marine Corps hospital,
Sandy Gully handed my brother, Thom, a baby, a second baby, a
third baby, triplets, the curse of the Irish triplets that ran in our fam-
ily. Thommy named the babies Abraham, Beatrice, and Siena. Abe,
Bea, and Sie. Our six-year-old sister, Margaret Mary, star of wonder,
was furious enough to want to run away. Thommy was twenty-two,
way ahead in life, way ahead of lucky me.
I avoided Louisa, suspecting her wise eyes could see I wanted to
move out. I saw more of Jocelyn. We borrowed Joe’s car, his Lincoln,
take it, kid, to drive to Ravinia’s evening concerts on the grass. We
walked to the movies the way I thought it would be. Summer eve-
nings after the brewery, after classes, after the library, I came more
and more to her apartment, taking blankets over to the beach.
“Sidney Poitier gave me goose bumps in Lilies of the Field,” Joc-
elyn said. “That body. No shirt. His smile. Negroes are so sexy.”
“I can’t compete with Poitier,” I said, “but there’s no nuns like
the ones he helped. They prayed and hung medals all over the desert,
and pretended they were experiencing a miracle, but they all knew it
was him that built their chapel for them, not the archangel Gabriel.”
“Always so analytical,” she said. “I’m cold.”
I put my arm around her. The rising moon hung low out over
the still Lake. Somewhere far behind us an elevated train rattled late
up the rails toward Evanston. The night was quiet. She lay back on

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