Page 94 - What They Did to the Kid

82 Jack Fritscher

Eisenhower, Karg had not liked me liking Ike’s Democratic oppo-
nent, Adlai Stevenson, because he was governor of my home state. If
Karg had a wrong side, I was always on it.
“Sing ‘Danny Boy’ again,” Karg commanded. “This time,
louder, in German.” Ha ha ha.
Lock stood up and joined me, and saved me.

March 19, 1957
Feast of Saint Joseph

Two days later, in the middle of lunch, Father Gunn, the once-and-
always Chaplain to the United States Marine Corps, strode like a
Fury into the refectory. He rang the brass hotel-desk bell on his
table—pounded it repeatedly, a touch of urgency—to silence the
grand Peter Rimski who was reading from the Martyrology about
the Patron Saint of Dentists, Saint Apollonia, the Egyptian martyr.
After the anti-Christians broke out her teeth with pliers, she was
given the choice of renouncing Christ or being burned alive, so she
leapt onto the fire herself. Saint or not, she was no miracle worker,
because when I had prayed to her, spitting mud and blood out of my
mouth, she had not saved my two front teeth.
Gunn himself climbed up into the lectern. A shaft of noon sun-
light blazed down on him from the high Gothic window. He and
his strawberry toupee glowed in a dazzle of a thousand-watt divine
wrath.
He held a plate.
“You’ll never hear the end of this,” Mike Hager whispered to me
from the next table.
“Saint Apollonia,” Lock whispered, “had it easy.”
The priest elevated the gray plastic serving plate above his head
as if he were elevating the Host saying Mass. “This,” he said, “is
the height of vulgar ingratitude. The good nuns are shocked. They
were in displaced people’s camps. And you shock them! The Father-
Treasurer is beside himself with anger. We brought those nuns here,
rescued them from those camps. And yet you, you, you insult them!”
He read the inscription. “This seems to be the best that educated

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