Page 99 - What They Did to the Kid

P. 99

What They Did to the Kid 87

He was a young priest, new that year, quiet and unreachable.
Maybe he ran out on us because it made him sad we were just a
bunch of kids, just kids, trying to make something out of something
that was forbidden. Lock, pleased that at least one faculty priest
attended, ad-libbed into his valedictory speech that he was glad some
older, more adult interest was being shown us.
But I felt more like a kid than ever, even if I was graduating,
facing another summer in the world. I made up my mind. I was
seventeen, about to be eighteen, feeling my innocence ridiculous. I
had to know. One seminarian from Philadelphia was playing forbid-
den race records, Negro music, like Mickey and Sylvia singing “Love
Is Strange.” I was intellectual enough to know. I wondered how
strange. I geared myself up and made up my mind and went without
stopping to the priest in the Confessional and asked him point blank
how it was done, how the two, like Charlie-Pop and Annie Laurie,
got together for sex.
He told me all it was, and it was somehow terribly disappointing,
because I had felt some tedious obligation to know one of life’s big
secrets.
Trying to be pure had been terribly difficult, because I had no
idea of what the temptation was supposed to be. Sin had something
to do with girls, but no one spoke clearly.
I had to know what it was besides interfering with myself that
celibacy required I give up, so knowing that, I could leave it, not
needing it, and be free to search in myself for the priestly self that
needed finding.
My need to know was real enough. My mother wrote me a spe-
cial letter. Charlie-Pop was so proud, she said. She was pregnant. I
could hear the pitter-pat of little feet walking in to replace me.
They could have asked. Thommy was bad enough. I felt the way
all first-borns feel, forever falling from being the only child.
“We’re so happy with you and Thom,” she wrote, “we thought
we’d try again.”

May 29, 1957

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