Chapter also available in PDF
4
July 4 Weekend, 1960
Three years later in a red Volkswagen Bug, I roared out of Peoria free, white, and twenty-one, north on a two-lane highway, singing along with the car radio, “There’s a Summer Place.” Destination: the home of Mike Hager. He lived in the resort town of Wisconsin Dells. We had planned at Misery how my family could meet his family the summer before by taking our vacation at the Dells. For some reason, maybe a funeral out of town, Doc and Mrs. Hager never showed. Mike came alone.
My father had shot home movies of us all on one of the small tour boats. On screen we cruised across mirror-smooth water, among beautiful rock formations with my mother pointing up at the delicate cover of green forest.
Thom stood in the background, smoking, hating the vacation, hating us singing along in the silent movie with the tour guide who was an Irish tenor happy to hear we were the O’Hara Family. Fluttering in 8mm Technicolor, we all took turns holding my little sister, Margaret Mary, isn’t she cute, forever the new baby, who was three, and always imitating us, talking anachronisms about things the family did “before the baby was born,” as if she had preceded herself, till I told her to cut it out.
When the boat reached “The Wonder Spot,” a place in the forest where baseballs rolled up hill and we all looked like we were standing at gravity-defying forty-five degree angles to the ground, Mike and I had taken the movie camera from my father and we shot each other sideways and upside down, and when I ran the movie backwards through the projector, everyone laughed.
I even showed the movie once at Misery. I was the first boy in the whole history of Catholicism to return to the seminary with a movie camera and a projector, but I had to mail them both home because Rector Karg said, “Just when I think you’ve thought up everything, you think up something else.”
At twenty-one, I was embarrassed because I looked no more than fifteen. My summer job was pumping gas at a filling station owned by my father’s best friend who was the rich Mason. He had given me the weekend off. My red Volkswagen Bug, borrowed from my dad, hugged the unbanked curves, except when my speed swung my rear tires onto the shoulder, shooting small hailstorms of gravel into the birches and pines. I loved the radio competition between the bad boys and the good boys with Elvis wailing “Heartbreak Hotel” and Pat Boone crooning “Love Letters in the Sand.” Nearly noon on the Fourth of July, and on the whole length of county road I had seen only two kids pushing a bicycle. Sunlight sifted down through the forest that arched high up and full over the road making a dappled green tunnel.
I slowed for a blind left curve, downshifting for the fun of it, still drifting a bit right, playing the small car’s quick response. In the middle of the road, two human figures, jumping like startled targets ahead, separated fast a couple yards before my bumper. I passed narrowly between them at no more than thirty miles per hour. A thump hit the right side of my car. I held the center of the road, skidding to a stop on the shoulder. The little car rocked back on its brakes. The dust cloud caught up and settled like powder all over the red hood. I sat holding the wheel.
“Hey, kid, you trying to kill somebody?” One of the two men ran up to the car. He was shirtless and built bigger than Hank the Tank. He wore plaid swimming trunks, and he shoved his face with a red beatnik goatee into my window. He ran a hand through his red flat-top and shook his head at me.
“Say I didn’t hit anybody,” I said.
“You like almost killed my buddy.”
The other guy appeared at my passenger window. “Hey, Rip, should this kid be driving?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What was that thump?”
“Kenny kicked your fender,” Rip said.
“See this fist?” Kenny leaned into the car, beer-breath first. “Rip’s like the strongest guy in town.”
“I said I’m sorry,” I said. “Watch where you’re walking.”
“Don’t get wise, kid,” Rip said. He made a big left bicep and snapped it a kiss. “I can turn this Bug over like nothing in the ditch.”
“He can. Like a turtle on its back,” Kenny said. “With you in it.”
I started the motor. “Back off,” I said, “I’m tougher than I look.” I raised my left fist and kissed it.
“Hey, kid,” Rip said. “Don’t kid a kidder.” He reached his big arm through my window. “What are you? Fifteen with a learner’s permit?” He clamped his hand on my shoulder. “Kid, you need like an adult in the car when you drive. I’m nineteen.” He pulled open my passenger door. “You tried to kill us. You can give us a lift.”
“Beat it,” I said.
“Get in, Kenny,” Rip ordered.
Kenny, playing Tonto, climbed into my passenger seat. Rip yanked open my driver’s door, shoved my seat forward, and jackknifed himself into the backseat. My little Bug rocked under their weight. I sat stock still, kind of scared, kind of thrilled. Kenny sat next to me, with Rip behind me where I could keep an eye in the mirror on his face and his red flattop.
“So like drive on, James.” Kenny leaned in and dropped the brake release. They both smelled beery.
“You owe us. You near killed us,” Rip said. He rolled a cigarette paper like a farmer, licked it, stuck it in his red goatee, and lit it. “Hang a U-ey, Bug man, and drive us to the general store three miles back.”
“I’m going the other way, toward the Dells,” I said.
“Like tough nuts,” Rip said.
The evergreen forest stretched for miles on both sides of the road. They were drunk boys and they were in the car and I didn’t know them and the world seemed exciting because I didn’t know them the way I knew everyone I knew way too much.
“You want a ride. I’ll give you a ride.”
“The kid sees it like our way.” Kenny double-beat the dashboard like a riff on a bongo drum. He punched on the radio and twirled the dial through fast blips of sound to a station he liked. “Hey, man, you know ‘Lullaby of Birdland, da da dee’?”
I whipped the car into a U-turn that threw Rip against the rear seat. They both started laughing. I started laughing.
“First you try to kill us, then you try to kill us,” Kenny said. “Me and Rip were gonna hike the beer trip. Da da dee. You’re like a lifesaver, Bug man.”
“What kind of a name is Rip?” I said. “Is that–like–a Hollywood name like Tab and Rock and Troy?”
“His name is like Ripley,” Kenny said. “Believe it or not. Ha ha ha. Da da dee.” He turned the radio up louder.
At Misericordia, I had longing fantasies about disappearing into the real world like a real person instead of like a seminarian, so I could see what real life was like. “Lullaby of Birdland” filled the car. Doo wat da doo doo doo wah da. It was summer. The Fourth of July. I was free. Doo wah. Real.
Ahead, I saw a store called “Fred & Alice’s” with a single red gas pump. I drove in kicking up our own cloud of dust. Rip and Kenny walked into the store as a really old Fred sitting on the porch looked toward me.
“Fill up?” he shouted.
I waved at him to keep sitting. I had learned how to pump gas filling up all those tanks at the Mason’s filling station where hardly anyone who knew me even recognized me. A gas jockey is such an opposite of a seminarian. People don’t notice the one and fall all over the other. Except for one time, a girl, when I was leaning over the hood washing her windshield, she spread her knees way apart and held her two dollars in her fingers between her thighs and neither one of us pretended to notice what she was doing.
“Hey, kid, like you want any?” Kenny yelled from the porch of the store.
All over the rustic wood front of the station, Fred had nailed metal signs for Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike. Kenny stood next to a three-foot thermometer shaped like a Drewry’s beer bottle. The temperature was 94 degrees.
“Any what?” I yelled.
“Like beer, man.”
“I’m driving.” I walked closer to the porch.
“Don’t be a dick,” Kenny said. “I figured because you were underage, you were afraid to come in.” He disappeared back into the general store. Fred thanked me for a buck-fifty for the seven gallons. I was happy. A guy I didn’t even know called me names. I was passing. I was one of the boys.
“Yippee!”
“Put the beer in the back seat,” Rip said. He and Kenny each carried two six-packs. “I wanna chug.”
“Put it in the trunk,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble with the Wisconsin Highway Patrol.”
“You boys be careful now, hear?” Alice came out to the front porch wiping her hands on her store apron.
“Hey, lady,” I yelled. “You’re a witness. I’m being kidnapped.”
“To the Point, man!” Kenny yelled.
“I’ll drive you, but I got to be going.”
All the way back Kenny yelled “Lullaby of Birdland” and Rip would yell, “Da da dee” and they’d laugh like some Morse Code to a punch line of an in-joke. For the third time in twenty minutes I passed the two kids pushing the bicycle. This time they stared as the red Volkswagen roared by.
“Can you get like parts for this car?” Kenny asked. Then he turned to the back seat. “Let’s get drunk.”
“We are drunk,” Rip said. “We are like so drunk we don’t even know Bug man’s name.”
“O’Hara.”
“So, ‘O’! We’re drunk and it’s your goddam fault.”
“My fault?” I said.
“No. I mean, his fault. Out there floating on the lake since six this morning. With the goddam car keys.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Deacon,” Kenny said.
“Deak’s got the car keys like in his trunks,” Rip said. “He never heard us yell at him once. We killed a whole case and he never heard us yell once.”
“A third of the beer was Deacon’s.” Kenny looked crossed-eyed into the back seat.
The rhythms of the car seemed to be lulling them.
“A third was his,” Rip said, “and we drank it. Therefore we are drunk. Therefore it’s Deak’s fault. Him out there with the car keys. Not coming when he’s called. Making us walk all the way to good old Fred and Alice’s.”
“That’s the turnoff road for the Point,” Kenny said.
We swung off the blacktop to a one-lane dust path. Weeds scraped the bottom of the car. Finally, the trees ahead broke into a sunny clearing that fell down a gentle slope to the water and a long finger of sand bar. Strange for the Fourth of July, the place was deserted, like a resort lake closed for the season.
“Our car’s off to the right in the shade,” Kenny said.
I pulled up next to it. “Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Nobody here but us and Deak like out on the water.” Kenny pointed to a rowboat drifting easy and silent, floating more on the lake glare than on the lake. “Nobody much comes out here anymore…”
“My dad owns the property,” Rip said.
“…except at nights, they come.”
“But only,” Rip sniggered, “by like…my invitation.”
“I’m supposed to find Mike Hager out here. His folks told me in town.”
“You mean Deak? The Deacon’s your friend?” Rip asked.
“You’re from that weirdo place in Ohio?” Kenny asked. “Crap, man, sorry.”
“That explains why you’re so weird,” Rip said.
Kenny laughed. “Hey, like we said, he’s out there in that boat.”
“Open the trunk.” Rip pulled at the front bumper of my car with both his big arms. They carried the packs through the clearing. Kenny sat down, rattling the morning bottles ranged like dead soldiers across the heavy wood table. Two rolled to the ground. Rip didn’t bother to catch them. He straightened up and rubbed the slight balloon of his stomach. “Damn,” he said. “I’m getting a gut.” He was hungry for compliments.
“How long’s he plan to stay out in that boat?” I asked.
“It’s not the beer,” Rip said. He pointed at me. “It’s your fault, O’Hara.”
“Mine?” I said.
“Yours. Deak’s and yours.” Rip belched and became very precise. “Like you’re one of his seminary friends, man. You tell me. His way’s no way for a guy in college to spend his summer. You guys ain’t castrated.”
“Shut up, Rip,” Kenny said.
“Remember that like fruitcake who came here last summer?” Rip was not to be stopped. He was one of those frank men whose respect Rector Karg said priests needed to court. “That pansy-ass seminarian what’s-his-name we got so drunk he kept doing those goddam imitations of the friggin’ Latin teacher, chanting ‘Polly Polistina, Polly Polistina.’”
“The one that kept flipping the finger and screaming like fub duck, fub duck, fub duck!” Kenny said. “How could I forget?”
“Fruits,” Rip said. “Fairies.” He turned to me. “You a fub duck, O’Hara?”
“Is Mike?” I said. All I knew about fruits I learned from Rector Karg who always told us before we left on every vacation that if a fruit comes up to you in a bus station, kick him in the crotch and run. I turned toward the boat and yelled for Mike.
“It’s okay, man. My folks raised me like Catholic.” Rip belched again.
“Feel better?” I asked.
He sat down. “Yeah.”
“We’ll all friggin’ call him,” Kenny said.
The table shook as they rose and supported each other to the sandy bank. They lurched together for a moment, stopping to watch across the sparkling surface of lake the tiny figures in far-off animation at the municipal beach where Mike had worked as a lifeguard.
“Damn,” Rip said, “I can like sniff it from here. Let’s row on over where the girls are.”
“You can’t drink there,” Kenny said. “Which is why we stay here.”
“We’re drunk anyway,” Rip said. “Blame Deak.” He put his hands to his mouth and bawled toward the boat, “Hey, Mikey-Mike!”
Kenny joined him. “Hey, Deak, come on in.”
No head popped up in the boat.
“Screw it,” Rip said. “He drowned.”
“Bull. He’s laying in the bottom asleep…”
“…passed out…”
“…on the life jackets.” Kenny kicked at the sand.
I sat down on the beach and took a mental picture.
“He’s been a screw-up all summer,” Rip said. He led Kenny back up to the table and rolled up one of his cigarettes.
For a long time I watched the water lip-lap up on the sand. The glare darting off the waves was bright as Rip’s squared-off opinions. Suddenly, way out from shore, Mike was sitting up in the boat the way you do sometimes when you’ve been drifting for hours and have forgotten about people and motors and then all of a sudden you smell the exhaust of someone’s outboard.
I raced up the bank and beeped my car horn. Mike turned toward the shore. He saw me honking and flashing the headlights of my red Bug parked next to his car in the deep pine shade. He waved and started rowing toward us. “Ryan!” Mike called. He handled the old wooden boat perfectly, nosing it on to the narrow strip of sand. “Ryan. Welcome.” He ran up the bank. We shook hands. “I didn’t expect you till tomorrow.”
“Surprised?” I said. “I phoned your folks this morning and they said come on today. I can’t stay the whole holiday anyway. My pastor wants me back Sunday night for closing of Forty Hours Devotions. He crapped when I left this morning. What a tan you have!”
“You know I was lifeguarding at the city beach.” He lit a cigarette. “What you don’t know is my pastor said hanging around a pool wasn’t a fit job for a seminarian.”
“It’s not,” I said.
“Saving people?” He blew smoke rings that floated up in the still air.
“Never stretch a metaphor,” I said.
“Ry, Ry. You’ll never change.”
Mike brought me to Kenny and Rip. “Two old buddies,” he said.
“Like…I poured them into the car.”
“We all got peculiarities,” Mike said. “They think they’re beatniks.”
“One of you Deacons got a church key?” Rip yelled.
Was he maybe slamming me with some inside joke?
“That’s a bottle opener, Ry,” Mike said.
“Oh.”
“We lost ours.” Kenny cupped his hand to his ear. “Like I’m waiting.”
“In my glove compartment, Kenny.” Mike fished his keys from his swimming trunks.
“Finally we got the friggin’ keys,” Rip said. “You want like some of this smoke?”
“I don’t smoke your kind of cigarettes.” Mike punched a slow-motion punch onto Rip’s big shoulder, turning him away. We stood alone. “You heard the news, Ryan?” He faced me square. “Dick Dempsey quit. He’s not going back to Misery come September.”
“He would have told me.”
“Swear to God,” Mike said.
“He would have written me.”
“Lock called me long distance last week.”
“Lock telephoned you?”
“I meant to drop you a postcard.”
Dempsey couldn’t have decided to quit without telling me. “He tells me everything.”
“Nobody tells everything,” Mike said. “Lock knew a month ago.”
“Lock knew? You knew? Dempsey knew?”
Mike shoved me. “Ryan, you’re famous for not knowing everything.”
“Get out!” I pushed him back.
“You can’t be told everything.” He pushed me again. “You’re a confessor.” Smoke from his cigarette streamed from his nose.
“You’re kidding me!” I pushed him harder.
“Don’t kid yourself.” He caught my head in a hammer lock and blew a halo of smoke around us.
“Misery loves secrets,” I said, breaking free of his hold. “Maybe he’s taking a medical leave. He had inner-ear trouble all last year.”
Mike shook his head. Our horseplay evaporated. “Stop,” he said. “Dempsey quit. Absolutely quit.” He stamped out his cigarette in the sand.
Quit was an even more threatening word than shipped. Quit was something a boy did to himself.
“You can’t quit a vocation.”
“Why? Will God chase us down like the ‘Hound of Heaven’?”
I felt jealous. In a world where special friendships were forbidden, Dempsey had seemed like a best friend to me. “He would have written.”
“He didn’t though, did he,” Mike said flatly.
Loss in the movies has violins. I had the hiccup duet from Rip and Kenny playing bongo rhythms on the picnic table. My Uncle Les counseled me that in his own seminary he had watched good friends drop out who had more vocation than he did. Dempsey dropping out was a shock. Every time a close friend quit, I made an examination of conscience to see if my vocation remained sound. Any boy’s quitting called into question my intellectual reasons for staying in the same way that priests feared other priests quitting the priesthood for good reasons other than alcohol or purity.
“Get changed, Ry,” Mike said. “Let’s swim.”
Later, wet and cool in the shade, helping Rip and Kenny with the beer, I weighed the difference Dempsey’s leaving might make on my life at Misery. Dempsey and Mike and Lock were best friends. Whenever Dempsey repeated that he was president of the Friends of the Friendless Friends, we always responded, “Who are the Friends of the Friendless Friends?” And he’d say, “I’ll never tell.” Our good times smoothed the rough spots. Any other boy in our senior-college class could have left without rocking my boat, but with Dempsey gone I’d know the difference. I was sure word from him would come, a letter from him, to my home probably today, telling me he was leaving the seminary and why. I hoped the letter would come, even though my hope was both a tiny sin of vanity and a venial sin of disobedience, because Dempsey had crossed over and we were forbidden to communicate with boys who left Misery. Not-knowing was proof I was left out of inner circles of fraternity.
“Later I want to talk to you,” Mike said as we came up dripping to the table.
“Is this irony? You big deal want to tell something to somebody…like…famous for not knowing everything?” I waved my hand around my ears. “Damn the mosquitoes,” I said.
“You’ll get used to them.” Kenny handed me a beer.
“Not in the daytime,” I said. “Never.”
“You guys like reject everything, don’t you?” Rip was up around Cloud 9. “You never want to accept life the way it is.” He groped himself.
“Hey! I only said I don’t like mosquitoes.” I turned to Mike for help.
Rip shrugged. “Sooner or later every conversation turns like to sex, so…”
“Rip, don’t,” Mike said. “You’re boring.”
“Sometimes Rip’s the town philosopher,” Kenny said.
“Big hairy deal,” Rip said.
“The village idiot,” Kenny said.
“Don’t start the bit,” Mike said. “You never understand. I’m not sure anymore I understand.”
“You understand it?” Rip asked me.
“I can’t follow pronouns.” I played stupid to stay innocent.
“About how you’re going to live without it,” Kenny said.
“Deacon sure can’t say how he’s going to live without it, can you, stud?” Rip poked Mike.
“Uh,” I said.
“Pick it up, fella,” Rip said to me. “You ain’t slow. Tell me how you’re like gonna live without it.”
“I don’t know, well, really, if I can tell you so you’ll understand exactly the theological position we’re in.”
Mike moaned and threw his head down on the table. He made me mad, knocking his forehead on the wood while I tried to unravel my real relation to the Church and all the souls in the Church who would call me their spiritual Father. Rip chugged the last of a beer during the most intricate part of my explanation. He tossed the bottle over my head into the pines. Wet drops sprayed down my bare back. I stopped. Rip and Kenny and Mike were all shaking their heads.
“See,” Rip said. “You rejected my question. I asked you about women, man. You need, like, such a big bush ha ha ha to beat around?”
“Have you ever wanted to get married?” Kenny asked.
Mike rolled his eyes.
“No,” I said. “I’m not old enough.” I hated these conversations because I could never explain this part of a vocation to anyone.
“Have you ever thought about it?” Rip asked.
“I’ll be the first one to admit,” I said, “behind every man’s a great woman. Priests have the Mother of God behind them.”
“So you’ll marry the Mother of God,” Rip said.
“Not literally. Symbolically. Men and women in the religious life are married to the Church.”
“You’re nuts,” Rip said. He was one of those people in the Gospel who scoffed at Christ. Why was he baiting me? Would men bait me after I was ordained? Or would they automatically like me because I was ordained? Or would I have to talk sports and drink bourbon and tell jokes about the priest, the minister, and the rabbi? Or would I be like Karl Malden, the rugged priest in On the Waterfront, who tries to save hard men like Marlon Brando?
“So these nuns,” Kenny said, “who wear wedding rings. They’re like married to the Church?”
“The rings symbolize,” I teetered on the words, “their mystical marriage to Christ.”
“You mean, they’re married to Christ?” Kenny said.
“Yeah,” Rip said. “Christ’s in Argentina with like Hitler and Checkers and James Dean.”
“Then what about these priests that wear wedding rings,” Kenny pursued. “Who are they married to?”
“To the Mother,” Rip said, “and to the Church, and, well, you know about Hitler and James Dean and Checkers.”
“Who’s Checkers?” Mike pretended to regain consciousness.
“Nixon’s dead cocker,” I said.
They all laughed.
“Ignore them,” Mike said. “Rip’s got a one-track mind.”
“Damn right,” Rip said, “and I think about it all the time. You read the Bible. You study it. The Bible says woman is man’s helpmate. That’s why I like them, plain and simple. I need lots of help.”
“If you understand, it’s all different,” I said.
“Different? You’re weirdos. You know it. We know it. We all pretend not to know you’re wasting yourself.” Rip turned to Mike. “Man, moping in a boat ain’t curing the problem in your pants.”
“Hey, Rip, is it really so important to you?” I asked.
“Sex?”
“Pussy.” I stared him down with the word. I had played my manly ace-in-the-hole: bad language. I was one of the boys.
“I don’t believe it,” Rip hesitated. “Like I really don’t believe it.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Mike said. “Head over to the beach. Rip could use some food.”
“Yes, let’s,” I said.
“Yes, let’s,” Rip mimicked.
“Give me the keys, Rip.” Mike was angry. “We’ll drive both cars back to my house and go to the beach from there.”
“Like take the damn keys.” Rip threw the ring at Mike. “You had them all morning anyway.”
Kenny went and sat in Mike’s car. “Come on. I’m hungry.”
Rip stalked off to the shore. He was relieving himself, writing circles in the water, reporting what a like big thrill it was.
“Come on, Mike,” I said, “let’s clear this up.”
We threw all the bottles into a trash barrel near the cars. Kenny set the barrel on fire.
“Some party,” Mike said.
“I’ll go ahead to meet you at your house,” I said, crawling down into my VW Bug. I pulled out before Rip came back from the trees. I wanted to drive back alone. The sex talk hadn’t much disturbed me. I ran into that all the time. I wanted to be alone to figure out Dempsey.
I must have been driving slow because they passed me on the way back to town and called me the big hairy speed demon on the way to the beach in Mike’s old Ford. It was Friday, so the beach was a lousy place to eat, because we couldn’t eat meat even if it was a holiday weekend. Even Rip and Kenny ordered peanut butter from the hot dog stand that was playing John Philip Sousa march music, and we all kind of goofed off sort of singing, “And the monkey wrapped his tail around the flagpole.”
“You don’t eat meat?” I asked.
“I have like enough,” Rip said, “to confess.”
The sandwiches lay like a rock in my stomach.
Two cute blonde girls in shorts and tops walked by. “Hi, Ripley,” they said, running off, giggling in undisguised appreciation of his build and his face. He had what a priest should have.
Rip and Kenny sloshed on into the water diving head first and splashing a group of pretty girls. I said I’d better wait. A radio commercial jingled in my head. “Don’t go swimming alone, because you can’t reach a phone. When you’re in Davey Jones’ locker, it’s too late to call. So don’t take chances. Learn all the answers. Learn swimming today at the YMCA.”
I was always treading water, alone, waiting, perfecting my backstroke, biding time for something. I was jealous of boys with red goatees who chewed peanut butter and jumped splashdown into lakes churning up the water, racing past my sidestroke with a freestyle Australian crawl.
In the Ohio winter, I ached for summers in the sun, beaches, bongo drums, and a beatnik beard. But I was drowning in inhibition and obedience. I was going down for the third time with purity. I was a seminarian, a theological student, and certain things weren’t mine to expect. Hell! Why couldn’t I be the first beatnik priest? I rolled onto my back in the sand. I had more than all those other boys. I had something. Not everything, but something larger than life. I rose to my elbows. They were all wilder than me, the boys who bought girls Cokes in the park and lay with them on beaches. I had always adjusted to this social difference as my special lonely way of life. They could all change faces for each other to get what they wanted.
I was pledged to stay constant. I spent my vacations with maybe one or two theological students from around Peoria, or was left alone with one of them, like Mike and I were now. We wore modest boxer trunks and swam together like little fish for protection. Sometimes we seminarians talked, lying on white towels we had ink-marked MISERY, about theological problems and how the whole world danced around ignoring the true meaning of life.
Seminarians either gossiped or talked obvious shoptalk. They bored me. I announced, “If our vocation could actually be explained, no one could ignore it.” The other seminarians accepted the mystery of the priesthood so nonchalantly that I felt myself drifting away from them. They were unquestioning. My nagging analysis isolated me from them.
On the opposite side, I felt myself defending my vocation from boys like Rip and Kenny who were worldly the usual way with alcohol, tobacco, cars, and girls. No wonder faith had to rule reason. Maybe these unanswerable questions Dick Dempsey and I had discussed so often had caused him to quit. At least he wasn’t shipped off to the insane asylum where I was obviously headed.
It was all too much on the hot beach. I wanted to plunge into the cold water, swimming out over my head to the raft. I wanted to watch the girls up close touch their blonde hair, wet in strings, finger-combing it, their arms lifting and tightening their small breasts under the swimsuits. I wanted to hear them scream and dive off the float, piercing the water around me when wild boys in red and blue and yellow racing Speedos pulled their arms or slapped at their hard little rears. They were golden angels chased by young devils and their play drew me fascinated toward them. If I were to be their priest, I had to understand them.
“Mike, I’m going into the water.”
He groaned a bit, lying all lifeguard-tan on his white towel, stretched half asleep in the sun. I walked across the beach of hot sand through the wonder of half-naked flesh. They think nothing of tomorrow, I thought, circling the prone baking bodies, splashing into the green water. They’re lost, nearly all of them, unless saved.
I swam out into the water, almost as far as I could, until the rock ‘n’ roll pounding from the speaker on top of the bathhouse grew soft under the lap of the waves around my ears and was lost in the quivering heat and voices on the shore.
I was out too far and began to swim back nearer to the diving raft. I hung on it, turned from the float, in over my head, treading water, feeling, feeling it warmer around my shoulders, feeling it bubble dark and cold around my moving feet. A girl swam up from the bottom so close to me her hands brushed my legs on her ascent and her solid breasts, wired in her suit, graded up my back.
My God, I want no bad thoughts.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” I avoided her direct eyes.
“You don’t live around here.”
I prayed, wondering if male seed in the water could get inside their bodies.
“Tourist?” she asked. She was Sandra Dee. I was Troy Donahue. The lake was a summer place. Life was a movie. With dialog.
“Like…,” I said, “…another tourist.” I swam off in a fast Australian crawl, never looking back, hearing echoes of Rip’s biblical “helpmate.” Being set aside from sexual desire truly was difficult, though in a way Rip and Kenny would never guess. Not because desire was physical, but because it was mysterious.
I wondered, I really wondered, treading water, warm on the surface, cool around my feet, what she looked like, the girl I could love and take for my wife. Perhaps my surrender to celibacy would make it easier to give her up if I could lessen the mystery, actually see her, if I could know what my flesh was losing, like Grace Kelly, blonde, not Marilyn Monroe, peroxide. This was harder, not knowing, because the mystery of her never appearing visible, incarnate, was so great. To see her swimming in the water, face and body and hair, and still be able to say, “No, my dear, we mustn’t,” must be easier than fighting off the fantasy of what might be.
I turned to look for her, but she was gone. A vocation has its price. The priests always said that. But what of the girls men who become priests did not marry? What happened to them?
I wanted to leave the beach. I was vexed with, not temptation exactly, but with unfocused sexual unrest, and Dempsey dropping out, and all those beer bottles. I swam back to shore. Rip and Kenny, towels around their necks, sat with Mike on a bench near the bathhouse, talking to the blonde girls who smiled, and sing-song said, “Bye-bye-eye, Ripley.”
“God, Ryan. Where were you?” Mike said. “Get changed so we can lose these two characters. My parents expect us home for supper.”
“I’ll go like this if it’s all the same. Let’s leave.”
In my VW, Rip and Kenny sat in back. I was in no humor to talk.
Mike pulled his old Ford out of the parking lot, still in the blue mood that had sent him to the middle of the lake alone.
I drove my VW three car-lengths behind Mike, following him to his house. In my back seat, Rip rolled up another cigarette, and he and Kenny kept laughing, smoking, and bragging, like two drunks, about catching a train to Florida.
“We could buy like a case of bourbon.”
“That’s expensive. Cost you like a quarter for a 7-Up.”
“We could pack it in our luggage.”
“You know what’d happen. We’d get like halfway there and run out.”
“We’d get off the train and like buy some more.”
“The train’d like pull off like without us.”
“We could borrow a couple bucks from your dad.”
“Hey, dad, like I wanna take a little vacation.”
“We could hitchhike down to the Keys. Take a month or so. Send back for the skis and get towed like a hundred miles. If you fell off, it’d be like a cool munch for a barracuda.”
“Lullaby of Birdland, do wah doh.”
I punched the radio dial as hard as I could and turned Pat Boone up loud: “Oh, Rudy! Tutti Frutti! A Bop Bop A Loopa!”
Rip pushed my shoulder. “Turn it down, Tutti Frutti, hey,” he yelled.
I kept the volume up.
Two blocks later, Mike’s Ford pulled ahead of me into the cement driveway of Rip’s house. I backed in up the drive, so my window was next to Mike’s window, the cool way of talking car-to-car, like cops do.
Rip and Kenny climbed out.
“Bug man, you’re like crazy,” Rip shouted, starting across the trim lawn. He dropped his plaid trunks and mooned us.
The three friends laughed so hard no one noticed I choked.
“See you,” Kenny said. He slapped his palm on the car.
Mike stared at me, car to car.
I turned off my radio. “They both…like…live there?”
“Kenny cuts through the alley.”
“Like damn, they’re crazy,” I said. “Worldly and crazy. But I like them. They actually live in the world.”
“They’re fub duck,” Mike said.
“Are they?”
“Follow me.” Mike backed down the drive. I swung after him, three blocks, driving under huge elm trees. Through the dappled shade of the afternoon, kids were already running with blazing bright sparklers. He pulled into the drive of a foursquare two-story house painted white.
“Nine rooms and a bath,” he said. Next door, the neighbors waved and lit off a string of exploding fire crackers.
Mike’s parents had more money than my parents. That was probably why they hadn’t come to the Dells to meet my parents. We weren’t rich enough. Annie Laurie warned me as I drove off, “Always act like you come from money, like you have money, like you appreciate what money can buy.”
I pulled a Madras shirt over my trunks.
“You look like you’re not wearing pants,” Mike said.
“I’ll tuck the shirt in.” I was very insecure.
“I was kidding. Come on. We’re late.”
In the dining room, flooded with light, Julia and Doc Hager sat eating salad in silence. Her faded gentility perched on the edge of her chair. A lovely bygone sparrow, Julia was, in organza green-yellow as an August lawn. Doc wore white: short-sleeved shirt, trousers, and shoes. All white but for a red strawberry stain clotted above his fold of paunch. He looked as if he were wounded.
“Michael, we’ve begun,” Julia apologized.
“You’re late, kid,” Doc said.
“Ryan. I was so worried you wouldn’t find Michael.” Julia motioned us around the table. “Ryan, this is Doc, Michael’s father.”
“That was settled out of court,” Doc joked. “Hello, kiddo.”
He finished his salad on his perfect china plate. Julia picked at a lettuce leaf, revealing a chip and a dark flaw running to the center of her dish.
“You’ve lovely china.” I had been prepared to say it. My parents told me to say it. I said it for practice so I could feel what compliments felt like gurgling up from my throat, inflating in my mouth, frothing through my teeth and lips, floating bubbles of praise toward a host and hostess. Priests who have no money spend many a night singing for their supper wherever they are invited.
“Thank you, Ryan. It was from my hope chest.”
“This is the last of it too,” Doc said. “Four place settings.”
“I had only eight,” Julia explained. “One was broken years ago when we moved to this house, almost on our Wedding Day.”
“Julia broke the other one herself,” Doc said.
“It’s an English tradition,” Mike told me.
“When a child gets married,” Julia smiled like a curator, “one is supposed to break his plate, symbolizing he may not come back. When our Julie got married, I broke her setting.”
“She’s not coming back,” Doc said. He took abrupt interest in me. “What do you do, son, besides go to the seminary in Ohio? You have to be more than a priest to get into this house.”
“Ryan is sort of a free-lance writer,” Mike said.
“He means I’ve broken all my lances ha ha for free.” I tried to put them off.
“Actually, Ryan is fairly well known in the Catholic press.”
Julia fluttered. “I read your religious poems. The ones the priests printed.”
“Mimeographed,” Doc said.
“They were lovely,” Julia finished.
“Ryan has sold at least a dozen short stories, but he’s really good at interviewing missionaries for feature articles about cannibalism in the African church, and there’s his radio drama called Mister and Missa Luba.” Mike enjoyed embarrassing me while he needled his parents.
“It’s such a comfort,” Julia said, “to know a close friend of Michael is such a good influence on him.”
“God knows he could use it,” Doc said, squeezing more lemon across his finnan haddie. He sucked his fingers.
“That’s enough, Doc,” Mike said.
Julia offered me the basket of rolls.
“Were you busy at the office today, Doctor?” I made conversation.
Julia’s eyes widened in her stare at Mike.
“With all the tourists,” I said, “you maybe do a lot of emergency dental work.”
“Doc, that is, the Doctor, doesn’t like to talk about business at home,” Julia said. “I’m sorry, Ryan.”
“On the contrary, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be.” Doc pushed his plate away. “I don’t like to talk about dentistry, because I don’t practice dentistry.”
“But you are a dentist, dear,” Julia said. “He has his degree. He received it the week before we were married.”
“He announced he was never going to practice dentistry the week after,” Mike said.
“Tell him why, dear. Oh, Michael, why haven’t you explained all this to Ryan years ago. You’re such friends.”
“I’ll tell you why,” Doc said. “I decided I couldn’t stand to put my hands in other people’s mouths.”
“That’s a laugh,” I said. “At Communion, priests’ fingers touch people’s tongues and teeth and lips and lipstick…”
“Disgusting,” Doc growled.
“He only wanted the title of ‘Doctor,’” Mike said. “That was the real reason. So he could be ‘Doctor Hager’ and move into nine rooms and a bath.”
“Now I’m afraid I, his own wife, don’t even call him ‘Doctor,’” Julia said. “Even I, who should understand him, call him ‘Doc.’”
“Everyone at the drugstore calls me ‘Doc,’” he said. “I like it.”
“Then you’re a pharmacist now,” I said. I should have shut up.
“Oh, Michael, how could you wait till now?” Julia cried.
“I think it’s very funny,” Mike said. “I don’t tell everything I know.” He grinned at me. “Do I, confessor?”
Doc stood up. “I am not a pharmacist.” His voice was imperious. He pulled a folded white Nehru cap from his back pocket, placed it on his head. “I am not a practicing dentist. I never was a pharmacist. I am a jerk. I run a soda fountain and milk bar.” He saluted, making fun of us all.
“But you are a dentist?” I asked.
“You’re like all Americans, sir. You question everyone who doesn’t fit some national stereotype. The national syndrome is to question everything along preconceived lines. Ryan, what holiday is this?”
“The Fourth of July.”
“The first Independence Day of the 1960s.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you a questioning boy?”
“He’s questionable,” Mike said.
“Have you noticed,” Doc said, “that our national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ begins and ends with questions?” He began singing, “Oh, say, can you see?” He stopped. “But no one ever asks me the most dignified of all questions: What do I prefer? What is my choice? Has anyone recently asked you what you’re all about? What might be your choice?”
Julia broke into such tears she had to excuse herself. “Not this again.” She headed to the kitchen.
“Good-bye, Julia, my wife,” Doc said. He turned to me. “Are you an independent boy or a dependent boy?”
“I don’t know. Independent, I guess.”
“That’s good for a guess and better as a choice…if it’s true.” Doc threw his napkin on the table full of china and stood up. He was quite tall. “Mike’s an independent boy.” He looked at his son and we all waited the longest moment. “Well…Good-bye, my boys. I’m off to the bright-lighted chromium drugstore to serve up malts on the Fourth of July. Later on, come on down, and I’ll treat you to an independent independence sundae.” He exited singing, “Oh, say, does that star-spangled banana still wave….”
Mike and I sat alone.
“My mentor is my tormentor, “ Mike said. “Nine rooms and a bath.” He gestured across the shambles of the meal.
“There was no call for you to lead me into an ambush,” I said.
“They deserved it.”
“Deserved it!” I yelled. “Your father’s ego and your mother’s humiliation?”
“He’s crazy like a fox and she loves it. They sort of have this act. Besides, they stood your family up on your vacation last year. They didn’t have to go away to a funeral. They’re insecure. Julia thinks my family isn’t holy enough for your family. She thinks you’re great, because your poems show you have a true vocation.” He rose and started for the front porch. “You coming?”
We tried to shoot a little basketball in the driveway. I beat him at a lazy game of “Horse,” and he put a half-nelson on me and we wrestled around and then pulled free of each other.
Off down the block, roman candles shot through the twilight.
“The season’s all wrong and it’s too hot to wrestle,” I said.
“You want to go out to the park or the lake?”
“What’s the use? Tag-teaming Kenny and Rip? Seminarians on parade. We don’t fit.”
He led me upstairs to the screened porch outside his bedroom. For a long while we sat in silence, with the one little ship’s lamp burning, listening to the evening sounds of the town beginning to ignite the sky. I rocked in a glider. Rockets whistled and flares went up and fathers lit fountains on the sidewalk across the street. At the Point, he had said he wanted to talk. I wanted to listen to him, but I sensed a danger, a chance of reaching out to him and getting hurt in the process.
He reached the lamp from his chair and turned it out.
I tried drawing a line between safety and charity.
Aerial displays exploded all across the night sky.
I was still looking for myself.
From way down at the park, some band played sweet patriotic music.
In all charity, I wanted to help him, but without losing the little self I had found. Confessions, especially late night ones, made me nervous. Boys always wanted to confess to me. That made me feel priestly, but I never really knew what to say.
In the sudden dark of the extinguished lamp came a moment more of silence while the bugs that had been fighting the screens so fiercely stood back stunned that their bright goal had been snuffed. The moon made blue-white tracings on the floor.
“This is the time,” he said, “for telling you.”
Out in the night of the Fourth, bombs were bursting in air.
I immediately sensed the huge substance of his Confession and prayed nothing Mike said would drag me from my vocation.
“I think I better not be a priest, Ryan. I think I been…I didn’t know how much till this summer…pressured all my life. It’s time I stopped.”
I pulled at my trunks that had long ago dried on me.
“Doc’s always saying he thought I’d be the salvation of this family. And Julia! She keeps reminding me she was pronounced barren forever after my older sister Julie was born. She prayed for a son, hoping, I guess, to change Doc. Anyway, to hear her tell it, Julie at the age of two was praying for a baby brother.”
He slapped the arms of his chair.
“Then, of all things, some clairvoyant nuns told Julia she’d have a baby and he would be God’s child. That,” he said, “that is when you start to find out where the pressure is.”
“That baby was you.”
In the yard across the street, lines of shouting children ran circles across the lawn with burning sparklers.
“Doc really elaborated on all this crappy family history when I tried to discuss leaving Misery. That’s why Julia was so glad when you said you’d come visit. She thinks you’ll be on her side. Your poems really convinced her you’ve got the perfect vocation.”
“Uuuh.”
“Maybe you do. Maybe she knows.”
He lit his last cigarette, crushed the pack, and sent the smoke swirling through the moon motes. “Anyway, I hitched down to Sauk City, right after my pastor made me quit lifeguarding at the beach, to see ‘Man of the Cloth,’ Arnie Roth, the only priest I trust. ‘Be an adult,’ he said. ‘Tell them you’re not going back, tell them you’re going where you want to go, to Madison, the Twin Cities, Chicago, wherever. Transfer over to some Catholic university like Loyola. This is between you and God, not mommy and daddy. Get away from them and this dead tourist country.’”
“But your father wants everybody to do what they choose,” I said.
“Doc?” he laughed, “he’s the original big noise from Winnetka. With a bad case of moral amnesia. Anyway, after I left Arnie Roth, I went straight to the drugstore. After what you saw at supper tonight, you know my father is obviously an escapist. A man who was told by his own father and mother that he had made his own bed and could rot in it. Every Sunday without fail he closes the dairy bar and gets dead drunk. Julia flits around him, still wearing the dress she wore to church, trying to humor him. Normally he’s cynical, but Sundays he’s unapproachable.”
The orange tip of his cigarette arced from his lap to his dark mouth, glowed brighter an instant, then descended.
Far off, crowds applauded fireworks we could hear but not see.
“Anyway, Doc told me we could talk. So I sat there an hour, real nervous, drinking Cokes and smoking. At one o’clock exactly, he hung a Closed sign on the fountain, and we had lunch out of a paper sack. A few customers came and went about their business with the pharmacist. Weird. Doc didn’t say one goddam word. So I put my hand on his and told him, right at the table where there were a lot of people around and he couldn’t make a scene. All he said was, ‘Number one made a mistake. Now number two.’ He pulled his hand from under mine and reached in his jacket and gave me a dollar. ‘What’s it for?’ I said. ‘It’s all I’ve got.’ He was almost crying. ‘It’s the last thing I’ll ever give you.’”
“Jeez, Louise…”
Brilliant fireworks popped streaming across the town sky.
I held my chair, pained, that for so long Mike had been wrestling alone, like Jacob with the angel. Wrestling somehow seemed the classic Roman sport of seminarians: wrestling with angels, devils, and sexual temptations. I knew that hearing Confessions would be like this. So I struck a more sincere pose, which felt terrible, really, and quite so false, that I added to seminarians’ wrestling card: vanity. How would I ever pull off actually acting like a real priest, actually being a real priest, when I felt like an imposter distanced from my own self?
“By the time I got home,” Mike said, “Doc had called, and Julia, my own mother, was in tears. ‘Your father didn’t let you down,’ she said. ‘There’s some things you’re old enough to know.’”
From outside and across the pines came the shrill cry of loons dancing on the lake, calm as a perfect mirror for the man-made displays of color and light.
“You know my sister Julie I used to tell you about? You didn’t see her picture anyplace, did you? It went out with the broken plate. She married when I was in eighth grade. Doc and Julia didn’t like that choice much and liked it even less when she divorced her husband for desertion a year later. She was eighteen.”
All the pieces, things Mike had told me at odd times in long talks, began to fall into place. At Misericordia Seminary, where time was measured exactly into the defined periods of the liturgical year, we lost all sense of real time and urgency.
How many boys were hiding family scandal at home?
Mike, free of being a priest, felt freer to confess to me, because he said I had a true vocation.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “The year after the divorce, you remember Julie went to Madison for a rest.” He stubbed out the last of his smoke. “There was no nervous breakdown. Just some blond Scandinavian guy from one of the tourist lodges. Damn, I’m out of cigarettes. Why don’t you smoke?” He patted all his pockets, then settled back into the creaking wicker chair. “I’m out. Anyway, one night that winter, while you and I were holy little high-school sophomores at Misery, Julie came home all beat up. She’d told this Scandinavian social director she was PG with his kid and he slapped her up all alone outside the cheery lodge, right in the street. Left her in the snow. A great melodrama, but no hero saved her and that spring, late, she had the nine-pound nervous breakdown, and it was adopted. Doc hauled the guy into court, quietly. He was fined or something. That pushed Doc and Julie even farther apart.”
“Mike, come on. Enough’s enough.”
“You don’t believe it. You think it’s Peyton Place.”
“You say it, Mike. I believe you.”
“God’s truth,” he said.
“But it doesn’t explain you, just them.”
“They’re the easiest part,” he said. “What happened to me even Rip and Kenny…like…don’t know. There’s Barbara.”
Barbara? Oh, no; but, of course. Why not? Somewhere in all this muck lurked a Barbara. My grade school had been driven crazy by the sudden bloom of sweet little Barbara with the pointy chest the mothers said was prematurely developed. The priests at Misery continually warned us there would always be a Barbara.
I felt sorry for girls blamed for boys’ bad thoughts.
I felt sorry for boys driven crazy by girls.
I didn’t like playing at being Father Confessor. The priests warned us that penitents always try to confess with too much detail. Don’t let them. You’ll only hear things you’ll try not to think about later, or, worse, their sins will become your temptations.
Mike was frightening me. He was no longer a safe seminarian. He had a Barbara. He knew what his girl looked like.
“You know,” he said, “with purity everybody’s got trouble. Alone or with others. Like Barbara. At the beach. When I was a lifeguard.”
“Your pastor spoke too late.”
“Thanks like a bunch.”
I wanted to ward him away from me. My vocation was too important.
“Barbara’s a good person.” He was focused on confessing. “I think the world of her, though I’ll never quit because of a girl. She’s only a small part of the picture. In July she told me, after we’d parked at the Point a few times, she thought she was pregnant.”
“Fub!”
“I never went all the way with her. She admitted it was someone else’s. Ryan, I prayed that night for her like I’ve never prayed for anyone before. She went to the doctor and he said her tubes were clogged.”
What had to be the last barrage of rockets and flares popped and exploded over the rooftops.
I was trying to be matter-of-fact. But I wanted to laugh. I had to control myself. After Ordination, I could not laugh in the Confessional at the comedy of it all, because sin could send sinners to burn forever in hell. No sense of humor could change that.
During Mike’s Confession, I had been afraid he’d seduce me to sin by example, by teaching me a tempting thing or two. But “tubes”? I vowed that after Ordination, hearing Confession for real, I’d not allow so many details.
“The doctor gave her some treatment and that was that. I don’t know if she was never pregnant or if it was my prayers. At any rate, this mess adds to my terrible certainty that I don’t belong in the priesthood. Doc and Julia have got me nearly to the edge. They want me to go back to Misery and talk to Karg and Gunn and maybe Polistina. So I’ll know my own mind—which I’m nearly out of.”
“Mike, what can I say? In a million years, I wouldn’t know anybody’s mind. Even my own. I can’t push you either way. Why not at least finish your last year of college at Misery?” I couldn’t lose him and Dick Dempsey the same September. “At least try it.”
“I’ve tried it for seven years, Ryan. For seven years, we’ve been best friends, and you know nothing about me.”
“You don’t know your own mind. Go back with me to Misery and look at your vocation in the context of the seminary, where vocation is real and has objective value, and is not a joke to guys like Rip and Kenny. That’s all I ask. Come back in September.”
“What time are you scheduling the miracle?” he asked.
“Mike, don’t,” I said. “You can always be an undecided plumber or an undecided salesman.”
“But not an undecided priest.”
“Not an undecided priest.”
Huge blooms of raining color burst in the night air.
“Thanks,” he said. “I mean it, Ry. Thanks.”
“The evening ends?” I asked.
“You go to bed. I’ll sit awhile longer on the porch.”
All around me in his bedroom were his things, all the junk a kid collects over the years and never throws out till all on one day. I figured Mike, like every other kid, had a shoe box full of stuff, but this kind of stuff! I had never thought of Mike being in the back seat with anybody, but I began to wonder what I would do if I ever climbed into a back seat, which I’d never do. The thought made me giddy. I mean, I stopped even picturing such a scene, because I didn’t want to sin with that girl, that blonde girl from the lake. With the wired breasts, no, my God! I had to drive home on the highway and couldn’t afford to go to hell for an impure thought.
Suddenly, I hated summers in summer places that threw us protected boys out into a wild world that asked questions, worse than Rip’s, we couldn’t answer. Misery, I had expected to tell me everything, but I heard nothing. At least, I knew I knew nothing. I was glad I was not like Mike, not like other men. I had that special priestly grace setting me apart. Summertime was hell and maybe the priests would be right to do what was rumored: send us off to a secluded villa for the summer, to be alone and safe together, away from the clutches of the devil and the questions of the world, and all the wiles of Barbara.
In five years, the bishop would send me forth, baptizing and preaching. I was a child compared to Mike. How could I ever handle the priestly situations that might arise in real life? I felt hot, all wrong lying in that strange room in someone else’s house. I knew all my life would be spent in rooms that weren’t mine, in houses that were strange, taking orders obediently from old men.
What is it like in a rectory at night?
I grasped at straws that might delay my Ordination. Tuberculosis or something from the movies like a war. Anything, because so much was to be done to me in such little relentless time. Tick. Tick. Tick.The sacrament of Ordination to the priesthood puts a permanent mark on a man’s soul. Once a priest, always a priest. Forever.
Mike lounged nervously out on the porch. He had found some cigarettes, stale ones, he had shouted, in the drawer. I threw back the clinging sheet, and knelt by the bedside in my swim trunks. My senses glutted with everything I had seen driving up, at the lake, and all I had heard tonight.
Something very loud exploded over the house and a rectangle of light from fireworks outside the window fell across me.
Dear God, I prayed, when one looks at girls for the first time, he’s delighted by what he sees. That’s fine and normal, but I should have done that at fifteen, not twenty-one. I’m even behind the normal calendar of my life. I’m too afraid to actually sin mortally. I have no idea of what goes on in a back seat. My conscience is too blunted to perceive the refinements of many venialities. I’m neither hot nor cold, Lord. Hardening. Don’t vomit me into the pit. Every noble intention I had for the summer, every thought of Mass, meditation, almost of You, Oh Lord, has been drowned in the rush of this beautiful world, the land of love and sweetness for which I long but give up for You. I don’t want this pleasure. It’s the hurt of the wonderful things missed, gone-by, time-passed, when I’m alone. Take this pleasure away. My prayer is never good. My prayers are emotional sedative at one time, emotional catharsis at another. That’s why I flounder so easily, why the world can swamp me, and not let me give a clear answer to people like Kenny and that stupid Rip. I will try harder, Lord, so I don’t lose out like Dick and Mike. I will be Your priest and life will be hard. I will never interfere with myself. Because I’ve started to be good so many times, I have the habit of beginning and not the habit of perseverance in anything. I’ve got to find me in reality, Lord. Help me define my vocation. I’m kneeling here, on this hard wood floor, asking. Even my problems aren’t real. Please don’t let me feel this. I don’t have a real bit in my body. Mike proved that tonight. Nothing will ever happen to me, unless I make it happen. Amen.
I knelt stock still.
In the hall, Doc banged into the bathroom, making asthmatic sounds. Then around the cracks in his bedroom door his light went out. Mike came in from the porch, dropped off his clothes, and crawled into the other bed. I heard him rustling the covers, settling down on the old creaky roll-away. Finally the room was silent around me as I knelt there, hiding myself, but only for a minute. One last burst of fireworks lit the room.
“For God’s sake, Ryan,” Mike said. “Get in bed.”