Page 414 - Some Dance to Remember

384 Jack Fritscher

neo-leftist films unreeled before him the repressed terrors of the anti-
fascist war of his childhood when he had wakened screaming from his
dreams, smothering in his pillow, pissing in terror of the Germans and
Japs who were trying to kill him. For that one month of double features
at the Strand he watched the comedy of pain and blood and shit that men
visit one on the other.
He could not resist his celluloid fix. He understood his relationship
to the screen. Dreams, he remembered as his own from childhood, some-
times shocked him in old film revivals and on the late show when those
dreams, that he had thought were his dreams, appeared as real scenes in
real films to which his parents had taken him from birth. They had not
been his private dreams at all, but Hollywood dramas drenched in vio-
lence and propaganda and chauvinism of all kinds. They soaked into the
blotter of his tiny head, were digested like popcorn into his interior self.
To him all images were erotic. During his orgiastic month, mastur-
bating in movie theaters, he was exhausted as much by his unrequited
passion for Kick as he was by the cinema bloodlust. The suffering on
screen was less than the suffering Kick caused in his heart.
He was a part of all he watched.
Technicolor images hovered over him, huge on screen, like carrion
birds over sweet rotting flesh. Catholicism had programmed him into
sanctified sex and violence. Every noon, for ten years, over silent lunch at
Misericordia Seminary, the priests had read The Roman Martyrology from
the pulpit overlooking the dining tables. Ryan digested his bread and
soup to those stories of mutilated saints tortured to Death for centuries
by bearded pagans who flaunted their own naked bodies, and by barbar-
ian infidels who trampled the beliefs he held. He swallowed the glamour
of martyrdom with his lunch. But the priests went too far. Ryan had left
them, refusing to become a priest at all, because, once they had admitted
him so deep inside Catholicism, he had decoded the Church’s double-
talk from inside out. The priests taught Absolute Truth, but they cau-
tioned the seminarians never to speak the full truth to the baptized—but
unwashed—laity. “They are not really ready,” Monsignor Linotti had said,
“to understand complicated moral theology—that abortion after rape or
incest, for instance, is permitted as a reasonable self-defense, because the
fetus is an unjust aggressor in the woman’s body.” It was not sex, but
intellect that caused Ryan to exit the Church. He had not known that he
was a born spy.
He had asked the priests about cardinals wearing scarlet and ermine
robes as opposed to their clothing the naked and feeding the hungry.

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