Page 72 - What They Did to the Kid

60 Jack Fritscher

“The more people you see when you’re home, the better,” she
said.
“You need anything, son?” Dad asked.
“I have enough to open a general store,” I said.
In the bottom of my luggage lay all my contraband: three bags of
Annie Laurie’s cookies, the extra books I could not resist, six 45-rpm
records, and my shoe box. I pulled the suitcase to the floor and sat on
the bed. I was beginning to work at the loopholes in moral theology.
I couldn’t explain to them my smuggling wasn’t a sin, not even of
venial disobedience, because it was no serious matter. This disciplin-
ary, institutional rule was only penal law, not moral law. Lock and
I had decided that. If caught, I would have to take the punishment.
Simple as that. Despite Rector Karg always saying the better thing
was to do the better thing.
Besides, reading about the human experience was learning how
to be a better parish priest. I could always easily skip the dirty pages,
because somebody was always eager to point them out. Besides, all
boys knew if you set a library book like the Dictionary of Slang on its
spine and held the covers between both hands and let go, the book
always fell open to the dirty pages. So a boy could find them or
skip them. Something like the dirty magazines in our neighborhood
drugstore, Saga and Men’s True Adventure, which I’d never noticed,
not once, not until Father Gerber warned us against them.
For a few moments we sat silent in my room, my father smoking
at my desk, Annie Laurie and I on the edge of my bed. My spread
was brown. I had requested the monastic reserve of that, but it was
chenille by her choice. I ran my hands over its tufts, conjuring the
cotton covers at Misery, all with the faded sameness repeating itself
on eighty beds in row upon dormitory row. An equality was in that
and an austerity over all. I ached to leave all the luxury my parents
offered me. They could never understand that worldly attachments
to chenille of any color might keep me from Christ in His simple
seamless linen.
“Well.” My mother extenuated the word with a puff of breath,
as if the grand show of the holidays were finally over.
Parents, I thought, never like to let go. I must remember that
when counseling.

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