Page 71 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 59

“You make it sound like there’s some big mystery,” she said.
I took the laundry from the bed. “Guess what?” I said. “There
is. Dad’s going back with me.”
“Me too,” she said. “All that rest you’ll get.”
“Aw, Mom, they’d quick put you to work with the nuns in the
laundry.”
“A beautiful woman like me?”
“Ever heard of Cinderella?” I said.
“Your mother as a nun? A German one at that? As if there’s a
shortage of Irish nuns.”
Annie Laurie shook her head. “They’re DP’s, displaced persons.”
She tucked my last book into the suitcase.
“This book?” my father said. “You’re going to be the priest, so
you have to read everything, but won’t this book get you in trouble?”
“Maybe,” I laughed. “But everybody’s reading Grace Metalious.
She’s ‘in.’”
“Peyton Place?” my mother asked.
“It’s no different than Peoria Place. The stuff that goes on around
here!”
“Hasn’t it been condemned by the Church?”
I tried to act sophisticated. “It’s not exactly on Rome’s Index of
Forbidden Books.”
“Priests have to read everything,” my father repeated. “A priest
has to do what a priest has to do.”
“Some of your friends have read it.” I snapped the latches on my
Samsonite suitcase. If ever a movie is made about Misericordia, the
lawns, the buildings, the trees, the classrooms, the gym, the chapel,
the boys and young men, all should look the way Peyton Place looked
in the movies. Perfect. Clean. Crisp. The idyllic Technicolor Hol-
lywood set.
“Every night this week, since New Year’s, we’ve had a houseful
of company,” my father said.
“Ryan, everybody wanted to see you,” my mother said.
“I think everybody did.” I looked at her and she was tired from
knocking herself out as a hostess. “This house was a solid procession
of guests from Christmas Eve to New Year’s.”

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