Page 88 - What They Did to the Kid

76 Jack Fritscher

without heat, real as anything, breathless, I slipped down onto the
pew, half-kneeling, half-sitting, hardly breathing, excited, gasping
for air, panting, that the whirlwind of grace had passed, leaving me
sated and triste-ful, a mystic in the Mystical Body of Christ.
Outside the chapel windows the soft urgent cry of doves soothed
me against the ruzzabuzza praying of other seminarians entering and
exiting from the ten Confessionals.
When the supper bell rang in the church, I walked down the
unheated terrazzo stairs to the refectory vowing to speak no unchari-
table words to anyone at the table, under penalty of eating no dessert
in reparation.

March 15, 1957
The Ides of March

Eight of us boys sat at each table, three to a side, a single at both ends.
Every day a different boy started the big plastic bowls of steaming
food. Gunn had regulated the drill after a feud at one of the tables
grew to such proportions that for almost a week the south end of
the table had only potatoes and dessert cookies while the north,
who always marched into the refectory first from chapel, hoarded
the meat and bread and vegetables and milk. Gunn heard about the
feud when the leader of the south stabbed the leader of the north in
the hand with a fork. From then on, Gunn himself ate alone, stand-
ing on a raised podium in all his Marine Corps presence, keeping
watch that all the food started with a different seminarian each day,
traveling clockwise, seconds returned counterclockwise, hardly ever
making it a third of the way back.
Of the twenty-nine tables, we high-school seniors sat farthest
from Gunn’s platform, exemplars to the younger juniors, sopho-
mores, and freshmen of Absolute Silence, while a priest read to us,
over the clatter of silverware on china, from the Lives of the Saints and
from spiritual books like Thomas Merton’s Seven-Story Mountain
and The Life and Death of Maria Gorretti, the newly canonized Ital-
ian saint who at eleven, no, it’s a sin, had been killed by her rapist,
Allessandro Serenelli.
We ate seven hundred meals September to June listening to the

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