Page 74 - Some Dance to Remember

44 Jack Fritscher

passion. “Live for me.”
Ryan loved Kick’s powerfully positive suggestions, because they came
from strength. Ryan had been born depressed. He had been drilled in the
Baltimore Catechism of negative guilt, that very Catholic spin on things
Annie Laurie had used to raise him the way she wanted. “Kenny Baker,”
so sweetly she said the boy’s name, “stayed out past midnight last night.”
The tone in his mother’s voice inferred that Ryan must never stay out past
midnight. Neither she nor his father ever ordered his obedience directly.
Ryan often bragged about the way his parents had raised him. “They never
told me to do anything,” he said. “My parents always arranged things so
I’d know what I was supposed to do. I was the best little boy in the whole
wide world.”
When he announced at the age of fourteen that the next school year
he wanted to leave home for Misericordia Seminary, his parents, who
wanted nothing more in life than to be the greatest thing a Catholic mom
and dad can be, the parents of a priest, sat him down for a talk.
“You’re not going to become a priest to please us,” Annie Laurie said.
In fact, they had raised him from birth to be nothing but a priest.
Girls, at worst, were occasions of sin; at best, untouchable. Especially
Ryan’s classmate, the daughter of his parents’ best friends, the apple-
cheeked Madonna Hanratty. If ever a schoolgirl in her plaid-skirt uniform
were perfect for Ryan, it was Donna whose budding Roman Catholic
breasts, cradled in her white linen summer halter, made him think his
curiosity about her was mortally sinful. He placed Donna on a pedestal,
with a reverence born of terror. She loved him like a brother, but she teased
him, experimenting with her own sexual wiles, virginally vamping him,
despite Sister Mary Agnes’s warnings to her that she not tempt a young
man away from his vocation to the priesthood. Ryan had heard about
that sinful breed of Catholic woman whose idea of big game is bagging
the parish priest. The more Donna teased him, the more frightened Ryan
grew about sex and sin and Death; and the more resolute he became in his
priestly vocation which was his safe refuge from the mortal sins the nuns
and priests warned him were to be found in the eager flesh of young girls.
Ryan, to save his soul, knew he must sacrifice everything worldly. To
save his life, which he long sensed was somehow different, to keep his life
from dying in a Midwest cow town, he had no choice but to run away
from home, the way fourteen-year-old boys ran away from home in the
polite fifties. All the way to Misericordia Seminary.
“It’s your life,” his father said.
“Whatever you want to do,” his mother said, “is alright with us, if

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