Page 69 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 57

3

January 3, 1957

The simple truth was my schooling ran like clockwork. I was seven-
teen, a senior in high school, four years into the seminary, and able to
speak Latin and German. Year after year, I traveled from Misericor-
dia once at Christmas and once in June for the three-month summer
vacation to test my strength wrestling worldliness.
My return to my parents’ home always reminded me the world
was out of joint with my spiritual life, my emotional growth, and
my intellectual awakening. I could translate ancient Greek and Latin
and modern German, but I could not break the code of life. Unlike
Telemachus, the boy in Homer’s Odyssey who searched for his father,
Ulysses, to learn how to live, I had to leave my family to learn my life.
My little brother, Thommy, was fourteen, full of war movies,
eager to join the Marine Corps Reserve as soon as he turned sev-
enteen. Thommy was distant from my parents and cold miles away
from me. “You’re a fake,” was all he said.
I punched him on the shoulder. “How fake was that?”
I was seventeen going on eighteen going on twelve. We were
Cain and Abel, like all the pairs of brothers in the movies where one
wears Blue and the other wears Gray or one is a gangster and the
other is a priest. We kept our distance.
“Ryan,” Dad said. He opened my bedroom door, tentatively, the
way he always did at the end of my vacations. Brownie looked up
at him with her big spaniel eyes, sighed, and put her old head down
on my slippers. Dad moved some torn Christmas wrapping paper.
“Mind if I sit here for a smoke while you pack?”
I pulled a stack of new teeshirts off my desk chair. My mother
had sewed my laundry number in all my clothes. My number was 66
and the first day of every school year I had to introduce myself to the
boy who was the new 99, because the freshmen boys who sorted our

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