What They Did to the Kid

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9
December 25, 1963

Silent Night. I faced the music. Christmas at home was a showdown game of chicken. Like Kennedy daring Khrushchev, I risked announce into the oncoming headlights of all my parent’s friends: “I quit.” Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful. On Christmas Eve, before Midnight Mass, people still reeling from Jack Kennedy’s death stammered in the snow outside my parent’s parish church and looked at my face, looked at their feet, and started to say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” then stopped.

“I quit,” I said. Dashing through the snow. “The world is changing. Faster than you know.” They buried their heads in their fur collars and scarves. “Even in Peoria.” I could never have preached to them. I could never have warned them. Christmas was lights and presents and “Yoo hoo, Santa.”

“You would have made such a handsome priest.” They looked at me, really looked, perhaps for the first time, at the amazing invisible boy, then said the same lines, all of them, the same lines: “Better to find out now, courage of your convictions.” Chestnuts roasting. They stared at me like some shape-shifter. Come and behold him. “Girls?” they asked. “Who’s the girl?” They drew their daughters in closer to them. Round yon virgin. They kidded me.­ “Now I don’t have to watch my language around you.” Barump a bum bump.

My father’s best friend, the rich Mason, pulled me aside and said, “Congratulations. You were always too good for that.” Everybody knows. People took my hand and pulled me to them. “Now you have to make up for lost time.” Jingle all the way. I was shocked they were so relieved. Oh, what fun. Grown-ups who loved me had kept their opinions quiet out of respect for my vocation. All is bright. They breathed a sigh of relief, as if abducted, I had rescued myself.

They welcomed me back. Quitting made me one of them again. For the first time in almost eleven years, I had no identity. I was not the best little boy in the world, up on the altar serving the priest at Midnight Mass and ringing the altar bells and swinging the incense in the faces of two thousand parishioners. Oh, Lord, I prayed, I can’t trust anyone. They all hide their true feelings. They never really cared what I did: go or stay. It’s Your birthday, but I’m the babe in the manger. I withdrew. They all lied to me. We fell into a drifted bank.

My father, in tears, said, “If you had left Misericordia, ten years ago, five years ago, but now, so close to Ordination.” My mother said to my father, “Honey, Ryan didn’t know for sure till now.” Mother and child. “Whatever,” my father said, “you want, son.” Kids my age, Danny and Barbara Boyle, stared at me. I had run from them after grade school. They never let poor Rudolph. I had not penetrated to the deepest fraternities of Misery. Play in any reindeer games. I was isolated, alone. Star of wonder. I had run from the seminarians at Misery. Star of might. The huge gap I felt separating the clergy from the laity was the same huge gap separating me from those pietistic twits at Misericordia. They would never change from how I left them. They lived to fight their tattling way up through the ambitious pecking order of opera clubs, the cliques of the Gregorian choir, and who was holy enough, with enough martinet snap, to be the showy Master of Ceremonies at Ordination services. Guide us with your perfect light. I was not Misericordia. I was not Peoria. I was on my own.

Except for the draft board. The day after Christmas, I walked into the Selective Service office and asked to change my exemption from “1Y” for “theology student” to a regular student deferment.

“A deferment for a big, healthy, strong boy like you? With Krushchev running around? And Castro? Ha ha ha.” The lady who ran the draft board had steel-gray hair combed back into a D.A. “I have 15,000 boys,” she said, “in Southeast Asia. Ha ha ha.” She typed up a new draft card that said “1A.”

Some group was always wanting me to join up body and blood.

The huge snowdrifts across the flat land of the Midwestern winter cracked. My life was a silent movie. I faced an ice floe of dangerous bergs: Misery behind, Peoria present, the draft board tomorrow, girls forever. At Misery, my vocation was on the line. Ten days outside of Misery, my life was on the line. My draft card ticked in my wallet. Forces were at work. In silent movies the actors jumped across the river from one bobbing ice chunk to another. Life lay across the ice floe on the other bank.

“A penny for your thoughts?” The blonde daughter of my father’s rich Mason friend smiled. “Do you like Paul better than John?”

“The Popes?”

“The Beatles.”

Her brother, home from college, came over to us with a bottle of wine. He reminded me of Lock. My brother, on leave from the Marines, folded himself in. “The more the merrier,” Thom said. He felt he had won the unspoken competition between us. His military career was no longer trumped by my vocation. He had married a girl named Sandy Gully. He had felt sorry for her standing outside the Marine Base at Camp Pendleton, choking on the Southern California smog. She was sixteen, old enough to marry Thom, The Gully-O’Hara Nuptials, but not old enough, her father said, to travel, especially her mother said, being pregnant and all.

No one spoke of my past. I was different. They acted normal, trying to fold me back into their world. I was the alien from another planet. Karma barana nick toe. They had always talked to the seminarian. Suddenly I was real to them. I was back among them: Lazarus come back from the dead; a childhood friend hit by a car lying in a coma for ten years, the Sleeping Beauty of boys; The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

They covered their puzzlement with laughing, back-slapping, and contests of singing parodies of carols: “I wouldn’t trade brass monkeys for a one-horse open sleigh.”

Not one of them believed an “I quit” rubbed out ten years and four months. Tick, tick, tick. The rich Mason faced me toward the facts of life: the ten years and four months, the nearly four thousand days and nights, the ninety-six thousand hours, the six million minutes, the three-hundred-and-fifty-million seconds, at five dollars an hour was $480,000 I could have earned.

Divorce of any kind interested them. They sniffed at my reasons. They all had heard of “spoiled priests” ruined by alcohol and women, but the spoiling of the best little altar boy in their world created a mystery. Where was my cocktail glass? Where was my girlfriend? Eyes watched from church pews. Faces glanced over plates at holiday supper tables. They stared on the sledding hill in the park where I took my six-year-old sister, Margaret Mary, rocketing down the toboggan run.

I was no great mystery.

I had no scandal.

I had no vocation.

My father explained to my mother, “He’s a cover without a book.”

“What?”

“His life is beginning.”

I could never write or phone or visit Misery again. Ninety-six thousand hours. I could never change my mind. At five bucks an hour. I could not go back. $480,000. I forced myself forward into the future. No longer was a bed and a supper waiting somewhere in some rectory. Life had no net. I sensed danger and adventure. I had a draft card. In six weeks, I could be in Vietnam, with no Jack Kennedy to lead me. In seventeen months, my classmates would be ordained to the priesthood. I panicked. I missed Lock. I fantasized saying good-bye to him at Misery. No real good-bye. So no experience of a personal good-bye. An imagined good-bye no more real than a grade-B late show starring Lock and me.

Lock: “Did Karg give you his farewell sermon?”

Ryan: “I stopped him. I said the Jebbie Jesuit took care of anything that needed to be said.” Close-up. Ryan. His face shows he remembers how he had lied to his father when his father had tried to explain the facts of life.

Lock: “Good. I heard it’s terrible.”

They look at each other as the swirling decked holiday halls of Misery empty around them. Carolers, far-off, sing, “Fa la la la.”

Lock: “Priests are like gypsies. We’re always saying good-bye.”

Ryan: “Life is an endless succession of good-byes.”

They begin to make dialog…

Lock: “Everything goes too fast, I guess.”

…to cover the end…

Ryan: “It seems all my life I’ve been standing in bus stations saying good-bye, leaving people.”

…of their friendship…

Lock: “On cold platforms.”

…each never to see the other again…

Ryan: “In clouds of blue exhaust.”

…like the movies…

Ryan: “Be a good priest, Lock.”

The two young men shake hands like comrades parting in the trenches.

Lock: “A good person. That’s what you’ll be. A good man.”

Close up. Ryan. He wants, for all the warmth of ten years, to hug Lock shoulder-to-shoulder. But he cannot. There can never be special friendships, because special friendship never existed. Even at Christmas. Camera: medium shot. The walls of Misery press too close. The face of Rector Karg appears. Lock himself begins to fade to black.

Ryan: “Remember the spiritual autobiography Raissa Maritain wrote about her life with Jacques?”

Lock: “We Have Been Friends Together.”

Ryan: “Good-bye, Lochinvar.”

I dissolved out to my real self, on a walk into the cold December, taunting the world to receive me newly arrived in the world, but not yet of it. No longer unlike other men. Other Christmases the bus out of Misery had roared past filling stations where grease-smudged young men stood intent around the raised hood of a truck, absorbed in tangled wires and steaming radiators and universal joints. They were in the world, unbeaten, unbowed, heroic, anointed in crankcase oil, unafraid. They were workers, not priests. They knew how to make motors work. They were serious about their women and children. They had focus, fraternity, codes, secrets I wanted to learn. This time I would penetrate the tightest circles. I promised to know their essence and match it. I would no longer be Saint Analogus, the Patron of Those Who Always Stand on the Outside Looking In. Ryanalogus, the Latin word for fool. I would be the real thing if it took alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and Masonic women. I knew how to make ready the way of the Lord, to make straight His paths.

I must have looked fierce at our supper table.

My father put his hand on my shoulder, looked at Annie Laurie, and announced, “He’s a solid man.” He said what Lock had said. That compliment was the supreme compliment to an Irish boy. “You can do anything,” he said. “Solid you are. Solid enough to calm down.”

“You are,” Annie Laurie said, “the spitting image of Charlie-Pop. He decided to quit smoking. Period. Cold turkey. He stopped.”

“So indeed I did,” Charlie-Pop said.

“He can do anything,” my mother said. “So can you.”

Somehow Christmas made me feel as turned away as Saint Joseph searching for a room at an inn. Jack Kennedy was dead. All connection to Misery was dead. I was dead like a stillborn child needing aid to breathe and kick and scream. Freedom’s slap was shocking glorious. I flew up in free-flight. I hung on the edge of the bed, nobody loves me, sliding out of the bed, nobody loves me, hitting the floor. Accidentally, I touched myself during the night and the accident repeated every night two or three times. I felt no guilt. How strange. After all I’d been told. I would never confess it. Nobody loves me. Who cares! I felt the wild way the whole world had felt, flown up in joy, when the war had ended. I was capable of choosing anything. I had free will. Potency veined sensuously about me in my bed. I would never go to Confession again.

Pine and mistletoe twisted into sweet peas and myrtle. How could such a grasp of self be a sin? Had I won some race? In the mirror, vine leaves twined time-lapse through my hair. Hell did not open up and swallow me. I loved the world and the world loved me back. Had those priests lied about grasping yourself? The world vamped me. I had always gone starved to bed. What else had they lied about as well? On the streets, billboards, small at a distance, loomed up large showing how much I needed all the world could offer. I understood the last temptation of Christ: Satan took Him up to the parapet and showed Him the whole world and said, “All this can be Yours if You will fall down and worship me.”

I began to nibble at the world. Tiny bites. Baby steps toward everything forbidden to a pious seminarian. I had changed movies like a double-feature. Good-bye, Misery with co-hit, Hello, Life. I remembered how the panicked priests had turned off the projector and ripped off the reel of Auntie Mame while all the boys were laughing at her yelling, “Life is a feast and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

To try life on for size, I read each billboard and movie marquee along the way. I sopped up the way of the world, the way it walked down the street, or shifted lanes with one arm and no backward glance. Clark Gable had died, like Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, after the three of them filming The Misfits. Jack was gone. James Dean was gone. Hemingway was gone. Marilyn, Monty, and Gable were gone. Gable was the man’s man women loved and men wanted to be like. Same as Jack Kennedy. Suddenly, all the grown-up people were dead. My little world shifted crazily on top of the great shifting shelves of the big world. Something was happening. Outside Misery, the world was picking up speed. The world needed new people. No more misfits. I bought the long-play album, Meet the Beatles, because it was new and an antidote against the universal sadness after Jack’s assassination. John and Paul and George and Ringo made me happy. “I Want to Hold Your Hand!” Rector Karg would ban them.

I asked our parish pastor, Father Gerber, could I go to the Varsity Theatre on the Bradley University campus. “It’s an art theatre.”

“They show condemned movies.” he said. “But with your education, you can go if you go in the side door, so as not to give scandal to people who might not know what you understand. People will never forget,” he said, “that you were nearly a priest. You must conduct your life with that caution.”

In one week, I saw The Longest Day, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.

“I can’t,” Annie-Laurie said, “keep it straight where you’re going.”

“They’re wonderful black-and-white movies about life.”

“Be careful of movies about life.”

I grew hungry for humans. I want to hold your hand. I wanted to see people wearing tweeds and corduroy and the foreign black sheen of faille and the weightless blue of nylon tricot. I smelled the world up close in the warm fragrant female smell entwined in long loose hair, bare scented arms pulled warm from greatcoats. I dreamed of the world applauding exhibits and lectures and theatres, till all its clapping became concerted applause, heady as Chanel and cigars, sumptuous cheeses carved on old wood with a silver knife, warm breads washed down with fine wine. What had happened to that world with Jack dead and Jackie in mourning? Hard work could move me through the world. Whetted appetite grew to craving necessity. For all the sports at Misery, I felt weak, enervated by Misery itself. I had been a priestling. I joined the most forbidden Protestant gym in town, the Peoria YMCA. I did sit-ups and pull-ups and push-ups and watched the other men lift weights until I could lift them myself. I read the pamphlet in the lobby that explained that masturbation was recommended for students and workers to help them keep studying and working. I was shocked to see in print in a public lobby, another word, one of the very words I had been punished for writing from translation. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh. I never even had to think how fast I must move.

I had been kidnapped.

I screamed.

I had been in real danger.

I’d been circling the drain.

Time so lost had passed with no trace of me in the world. Streets and movies and people rushed into my senses. Who needs salvation when you need rescue? Jack had his brains shot out in a car. I panted for life’s embrace. I sat crying in the movies. Where was my wife? Where were my children? Had they gone speeding by in a car? I had been robbed of any head start in life. What now? Is now enough? And Jack dead. Dear Jack. Gone, taken lost from us. Seeing double: his death, my death. Death should end the past, not the future. I escaped one world to find another. Adrift, untied. Without him. Where? Barbarians reared up in the uncivilized street. His brain blown away. Zap. Zap! Zapruder! The wind, the blowing wind, Dylan, blowing in the wind. Jackie climbed across the car. Dropped the yellow roses of Texas on the blood-spattered black upholstery. She didn’t remember crawling across the trunk of the car. I love you, Jack: she placed her ring on his finger. Parkland. Bethesda. Oh Love Field. Women in leopard-skin coats like to make love. Arlington and crepe. Jack and Jackie. The curtain descends. Everything ends. Too soon. A simple matter of a bullet through the head. Ich bin Berliner. Auch Ich. A fear more than grief folds its black wings hovering over everyone crying from Thanksgiving through Christmas and into the new year. Happy Birthday, Mr. President. I should have held things closer when I had them. Shalom, shalom! Oh not like other men. Kaddish. I am worn from weeping, the psalmist cries. Night after night my pillow is drenched with tears. I weep till the tears flood my bed. More compassionate and understanding and loving and human than before that Friday. Valleys are filled, mountains brought low. Oh Adonai. In Advent, I advented out of Misery. The helplessness of carrying on like this. He was the best of the world I did not know. Gone, with him, that world. I open doors to Advent deserts. Crooked ways promised straightness. So golden, lord Jack, so golden. You promised never to leave me. Then you left me. I escaped on my own through the snow. I don’t disintegrate, don’t die till the end of days. Feel nothing. Felt so much can feel no more. They made me what I am. The one question at the dusty bottom of the academic box of philosophy and theology: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How many times can Jack die in a single 8mm Technicolor frame? I, human, shriven, over-shriven, shriveled. Nearly died. Escaped into the snow. To run time backwards, like film, to warn you not to fly to Texas. Running Zapruder in 8mm reverse: 26 seconds, a fragile six feet of film, final harrowing moments, soundtrack, Gregorian chant, Irish lament. Each instant of the 485 frames another frame of past, broken in two places, with sprockets torn out and burn marks, another frame of experience née innocence running round and round looped through the projector, every way but upside down.

The mother, my mother, a mother awoke before dawn, got up. Beat the alarm. No jangle. Floor cold. She turned. Some former rich fullness of the morning was missing. The room was right, a bit mussed. Her house quiet, husband gone early. She remembered the smoke. No cigarette smoke languishing in the morning air. He kept his resolution, eating mints from the grocery. Today she remembered a letter would come. That day she opened the letter. Her son would write again. I would write again. Her boy’s voice on paper in that strange faraway style he’d fallen into during all those sheltered isolated years. His gift of a silver letter opener. His mail made her happy. Not this time. I’m coming home. She cried, she cried. For the lost vocation. For the lost May chapel, for the lovely scene of Ordination in lovely summer clothes, bishop humming above window-fan, snapshots, First Blessing of a newly ordained priest, her son. The greatest thing a woman can be: the mother of a priest. Oh him. What about him? All her hopes become luggage shoved back into a closet because of a splendid trip that would never begin.

Oh gone! Oh Adonai. Gone from me, I took the dream from them. No chance of home movies. No 8mm Technicolor Ordination Day. I was steady as a beam of light through a pinhole in an eclipse. An apocalypse. To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die. I sit tonight without my lord, uh, without my bucko, without my Jack, in eternal November’s eternal Friday. Oh, everyone. Take me as me. Veils stripped away. Be thou my vision, so unlike other men. Flags go up the mast, up from half-mast, to forget, to forget. The first weeks of all the weeks of the world that must pass without him.

I want to go to the sea he loved. To see the clouds scud along the sky of Martha’s Vineyard, wind whipping gulls to flight, to watch one impossibly white bird rocket up like a jet, becoming smaller and smaller till eyes ache to see the white spot in the pale flat sky.

Press the liquor from the loss into a cider’s cup of meaning. Guinevere mourns. “Roe O’Neill. Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky. Oh why did you leave us? Why did you die?”

Oh world. Oh litany of lost people, bleached girls with tight-lipped smiles hiding braces feather-dusting cosmetics in drugstores. Acne-boys under sudden mop-top hair and jeans and boots trying to be strong, smoking. Bald-headed men with lunch spots on their ties and old women who dress too young. Poor world. Life. Lost so long in the bowels of the Church. Ancient priests slipping down the drains of ancient corridors. How come to world, me, him gone. One world abandoned. I excess.

Sitting with Annie Laurie and Charlie-Pop watching the new nineteen-inch black-and-white screen after New Year’s. Jack Kennedy lived and died on black-and-white TV. On television, everybody faking Christmas joy that this year cannot trump grief. My parents, me, the whole country, like the 1930’s Broadway Baby belting it out, proving she’s still got It, then life goes on. Ethel Merman brought to you by Ford Automobiles. Gee, but it’s good to be here! She waves in that vaudeville way she learned. Old tendons in her underarms shadow obscenity under the bright lights. Her brave old sag propped by sequin-cinched waist. She finished getting a kick, a fabulous kick out of you. Annie Laurie likes Merman.

Charlie-Pop nods off, waiting for Gunsmoke. Television is all new to me. Amazing. I sit, a weird hybrid of Aquinas and Dos Passos, watching black-and-white TV variety shows like The Judy Garland Show strain desperately to entertain a grieving country. Annie Laurie dislikes Judy Garland. She tried to kill herself. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She makes me nervous. She’s a wreck of a woman. My mother doesn’t know she’s a Platonist, and married to a Platonist, and the mother of a Platonist. She leaves the room.

Judy Garland, alone on an empty stage, sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and makes it about Jack Kennedy.­ Sing it! My God, she’s so scary you can’t turn away. She makes you root for her. Makes the anthem a hymn. Lifts us up and carries us onwards. Glory, glory Hallelujah. Close-up: painted face of Garland in torture. Her hands framing her face like white gloves around black face in a minstrel show. She carries us on, JudyJudyJudy, always a favorite of PeterPeterPeter. Picks the nation up. Television’s prerecorded chilling crescendo of background voices. Mechanically reproduced audience. Sent to glory hallelujah. She tried to kill herself, but couldn’t do that. Glory, glory, Misericordia. Back a tremble, a hit on TV. Lady of the World. Shredding emotion with all the feeling she can pull out of a top hat and tails. Katharsis, catharsis.

Don’t make me cry. Don’t let me feel. Stop her, stop her. Let me be sick first. I have to think. Stop. The world begins to glut me. The world. The word. What is the word? What is the word made flesh? What is the world made flesh? Stop the World! I Want to Get Off! I seek to pull my life from the wreckage of eleven lost years. The clock is ticking. The chase is on. Move it or lose it. Make up for lost time. No more circling the drain. Is it always high noon when your shadow stands around your feet in a puddle?

February 1964

In February I came from the family limbo of Peoria, north, to a new life in a new school in a new city. I met Joe and Louisa Bunchek in the Chicago Sun-Times classifieds. They provided board and an attic room for twenty dollars a week near the Loyola University Lakeshore Campus. They were real and suited my mood. They let me alone at first, only expressing wonder at all the books I had moved in for my first semester in graduate school.

“Those Jesuits at Loyola,” they said, “sure make you crack the books.”

They introduced me to visiting company, even on my way through their kitchen to the bathroom, as a seminarian.

“The last two boarders were in the seminary too,” Louisa reminded her guests who were all relatives. “God must sure think we need watching over.”

Everyone smiled as I disappeared into the toilet. Someone was always coming and going at the Buncheks. They lay in wait outside the bathroom to stare at me, glowing like a holy picture, when I came out.

Alone in the kitchen, sitting with Louisa Bunchek, I felt she was racier than any woman I’d ever known. Night fell fast in deep winter in Chicago’s Rogers Park. I liked her.

Outside the back door, across Sheridan Avenue, closed by the loveliest blizzard in the world, I watched a lone woman sit reading in the ornamented glass ticket booth, frosted like an igloo, under the bright marquee of the Sheridan movie theater. Sometimes I’d call her, watch her look up, bored, as her phone rang, and, invisible, across the drifting distance of the frozen night, I’d ask her what time the next feature began.

The forbidden Cleopatra was playing out our back door, across the snowy street. Inside the huge movie palace, one ticket made winter into Egypt with Liz Taylor repeating, two showings a day, “Now will I begin a dream of my own.” Twice a day, Richard Burton’s Antony announced, “The ultimate desertion. Me from myself.”

Signs and omens were everywhere.

Loyola Campus lay frozen, covered with snow, on the icy banks of Lake Michigan. The muffled city shimmered in streetlight and moonlight and starlight.

Who needed Egypt?

“A beer sounds right,” Louisa said. “Stop calling that girl in the ticket booth. Her job is bad enough without you.” Her housecoat opened as she pulled the metal can cold from the refrigerator, stabbed it with a green-handled opener. The beer bubbled up over the can. She threw the opener into the drawer, picked up the beer, and savoring her foamy fingers, bumped the drawer closed with her hip.

“Want one?” she asked. She sidled over to the kitchen table. “What you reading?”

“Big test tomorrow. Chaucer.”

“Aw, you’ll do good in it.” She nudged my shoulder. “More’s the pity.”

“What?”

“More’s the pity. All your brains and nothing to show for it. No money. No fun. No girls. All for a big fat report card.”

“For now.”

“You’re not like my three boys.”

She was a famous conversationalist in her family. Often I chose not to study in the attic so she could trap me in the kitchen where I listened to her, all the while moving my pencil across my yellow legal pads of notes. She always sat up, late and alone, the nights of that winter and spring. She wanted to talk. She was interested in the scar of vocation not yet closed on my skin. She wanted to rub her finger across it. She knew I was an open wound pretending I was a brave boy.

Joe Bunchek peered into the kitchen. His bare feet padded across the scrubbed linoleum. Like a little boy himself he wore jersey pajamas, maroon, that in walking made prominent the loose sway of his equipment which was the constant center of Louisa’s comedy patter.

“Get those big old things away from me,” she said to him. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”

“Listen here, Queenie, lay off the beer. That’s the sixth one since supper.” They often quarreled openly for sport. Joe could only beat Louisa by silence. Too often he forgot to use his best weapon.

“Joe Blow, do you have to watch everything I do?”

They both acted like I was an invisible audience invited into their house. The twenty bucks for my room was the price of admission to their floorshow.

“Who earns the money that buys your beer?”

“Do me a big favor, Joey. Take the money. Run off to Florida.”

“Don’t tempt me twice.”

“Take the money and run off.” She taunted him beyond belief. Her body had given out before his, earning him her undying resentment.

“Money I don’t need,” Joe said. “I can go out and earn it.”

“Take it anyway. Go ahead.” Louisa became grand. “I’ll get a room by myself.”

“Kid, are you looking for women?” Joe said to me. “Forget it. Queenie’s worse than when she was sixteen. She was frustrated then.”

“I should have gone out and had some drinks by myself tonight.”

“Oh mother, you talk like a lady with a paper nose.”

“Oh you, you’re so funny.” Louisa turned, her face flushed under the thick permanent swirls of her very fixed black hair. From her depths she shot tremendous strength to her middle finger, thrusting it manfully in Joe’s face. “Take that,” she said and turned to her beer.

Joe reeled. “Women don’t give men the finger.”

“What planet are you on?” Louisa said.

Joe fell into a kitchen chair and put his head in his big arms on the table. I sat quietly across from them, sorry for him at the mercy of her change-of-life. She had taken away his part. She had gestured like a man. He was a handsome middle-aged man with big-nosed Balkan features and a drayman’s pride in his body. It had given him three sons and he knew how to strut. His hard high chest had not softened over his strong belly, and Louisa maybe shunned him, but he had heat, he jibed at her, at the house where the girls knew all the tricks. He was a proud man. He worked. They owned a brick house. They had cars. He was not falling apart. She was enjoying falling apart. She had gestured like a man, not graciously like the nice old lady, refinished with a doll-face of her choice, that his old age had envisioned for itself.

Joe raised his head from his arms. He grimaced at her. “Nyaaa,” he bleated.

Louisa threw her can in the sink. “Men!” she said and left the kitchen.

Joe sat uncaring. As quickly as Louisa disappeared, he could not remember why. Her gesture was already a joke to him. Even I had heard to the fourth power, in my three months in their attic, Louisa’s endless stories. Yellow legal pad, number 4, page 16. She should have been a showgirl, she always said. Her mother had been in an act with Marie Dressler and Polly Moran, but pulled out right before they hit the big time in Hollywood. She could still turn an ankle with the best she said, even though—without much connection—her father deserted them leaving her with, cue the miniseries, no money or music lessons and at the mercy of her handy curious brothers. She had let Joseph Bunchek penetrate her secrets at the wake of one of her uncles. I had visions of them doing it on the casket, they were so open about everything. He knew she wanted what they all wanted, seed and cash, but she was easy and Catholic, so he married her a week later in Indiana. She followed him doggedly through the Navy camps on the East Coast during the war, dropping three babies in quick succession. She never forgave him for what it did to her hips and rear.

“Kid,” Joe said, “you still looking for a job?”

“I got a test tomorrow.” I looked at the clock. “Really, I got to study.”

He did not hear. “I heard of one through Lou Lou’s brother. You can make good wages. Union, like that. ’Course, you’ll have to be able to work. Get your hands dirty. You ain’t built like I was when I was your age.”

He read my scar and rubbed it raw. He carried himself with authority.

“When I was your age, I was married, with two kids and knew what-for. I didn’t sit around schools all day. I took my back and my pack and hired out for what I could get. Not for what I was worth. I was worth a hell of a lot more than I got. Ask your daddy about the Depression.”

“I have. Lard sandwiches. Snow. Six miles to school.” I looked at my watch. “God, it’s late.”

“Go to bed, kid. We’re in the same boat, don’t you know.” He stood up.

“What?”

“Man-to-man. Some day I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

Joe Bunchek hinted at the secrets.

This time I was not going to lie as I always had and say, “You don’t have to tell me. I already know.”

I needed the Buncheks.

“Say ‘good-night,’ kid,” he said.

April 14,1964

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote, the droghte of March hath perced to the rote, when April showers have pierced to the roots the drought of March, many mornings I woke wet, tented like the human tripod. Don’t touch it. To head to the bathroom and kitchen, I sidestepped into the old Misery dormitory trick and pulled on my Jockey shorts under the covers, flipped the blankets, and stepped into my pants.

Even in April, 120 days out of the slavery of Misery, I could not believe I had bought my way upriver. Gunn and Karg warned us regularly about ex-seminarians. “They go off the deep end, lose their faith, stop going to the sacraments. The ruin of the best is the worst.” Touch it. I woke each day hoping to be swept away, but life was as ordinary as Louisa’s cupboards stocked with bread and canned goods.

Misery was a past I had to live with, like a girl who got pregnant and gave the kid up for adoption. I remained a jerk. Touch it. Don’t touch it. Which is sweeter? You can take the boy out of Misery, but you can’t take Misery out of the boy. Jacob wrestled with a goddam angel. I fought the good fight. I wrestled with priests to beat those priests and priestlings at their own game. What had I done? I denied my past and destroyed my future.

My Uncle Les said, “God ordered Adam and Eve out of the Garden. You walked out on your own.”

I had moved from Gregorian chant into the polkas of Rogers Park and the hootenannies of Old Town and the jazz clubs of Rush Street on the Near North Side. I stared at the lights shining from the windows of the Playboy mansion on the Gold Coast and watched the crowds coming and going at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, not yet prepared to walk through any doors.

‘This is my philosophy: If you aren’t adjusted where you are,” I told the Buncheks, “then go where the adjustment is.”

“So you studied philosophy,” Louisa said, “in a fortune cookie factory.”

“I want to go where I want to go and do what I want to do.”

“Suit yourself,” Louisa said. “I’m staying put.”

“You need to get around a little more,” Joe said.

April descended on Chicago. My first spring. I was free and ready to defrost. Abandoned blankets lay in the streets along the curbs where drivers stuck in the blizzard had thrown them under their spinning tires to escape. Little yellow crocuses bloomed around the edges of dirty frozen snow drifts. Vine leaves grew in my pants. I walked through people in the Loop. I sat with steaming coffee along the cement walks and walls of the Chicago River the city dyed green for Saint Patrick’s Day. I had never watched skyscrapers light up by night. Never had I felt such wind. Evenings, coming back to Louisa’s, I ran down the streets from the El train, jumping from pool to pool of lamplight in the spring rain.

My one attic window, large and round, looked down on Magnolia Street, where cars maneuvered silently between two parked lanes as furtive as great dark beasts hunting a curbside lair for the night. I owned no car. I owned no house. I was free beyond belief. I felt wickedly suspect: I was alone, rattlingly poor in someone else’s attic. A dream come true. I had finally ended one world of my life. Everything seemed possible. I wandered into coffee shops and bookstores, watching people. I wrote notes in my yellow legal pads. A Journal. Twice a week the double-feature changed at the Bryn Mawr Theater. On the marquee at the Devon, A Thousand Clowns was in its second year. Louisa rattled out the wonders of money and a good job. Her middle son—my age—was a junior accountant in the Loop.

“I’m not sure yet how important money is to me,” I said. “Roof, bread, tuition.”

“Make sure you have twenty bucks a week.” She kept the rent money powerful between us. She grinned when I found a job. “Doing what?” She hooted with laughter. “Demonstrating Hoover vacuum cleaners?”

“Shut up!”

She was a comedian.

“In department stores?”

“Really, shut up.”

She was a lounge act at the local bar…

“In Marshall Field?”

…appearing nightly in the Plywood Room.

“So?” I said.

“Throwing baking powder on the carpet?”

“It’s a job.”

“Vacuuming it up?”

She had us both doubled up with laughter.

“Yes.”

“Blowing the beach ball in the air…”

“I make $3.25 an hour.”

“…on a wand?”

“Yes.”

We were screaming with laughter. She was the funniest woman in the world. I fell into her arms.

“Hey!” she said. “Hey! Hey! Hey! I ain’t your girlfriend.”

“Sorry. You kill me.”

By the next afternoon, opening a beer, she said, “Joey found you a better job.”

“Part-time?”

“Yeah. You can’t spend all your time studying and blowing beach balls.” She toasted herself. “You’ve got to date too.” She trailed off into the living room. “You’ve wasted too much time.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks so much.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“What’s the job?”

“I don’t know. Joey will tell you.”

Any revelation Joe had I trusted.

Louisa plopped down on the couch. Her thighs scooting back on the plastic sounded like a martyr’s flesh tearing. She loved plastic. On the lampshades. On the footstool. “If I didn’t rent out a room, I could uncover this furniture, but I wouldn’t.”

“Save me from studying Victorian lit,” I said. “You want to watch the late show tonight?”

“What’s on?” she asked. “Not another one of those gladiator movies.”

“Never on Sunday,” I said.

“Already on the late show? I should have gotten more beer. Never on Sunday is not very old.” She was feeling fully Queenie enthroned on the couch, a mystery woman, a woman of mystery, revealing everything, revealing nothing, an object lesson in something. Her feet rested up on the coffee table. “Sit down,” she said. She made busy, buttoning her housecoat to her throat, but over her breast the cloth hung loose and apart, a dark tunnel lit by the alternating light and shadow from the TV screen. One pendulous sag was visible and moving, blanched white by Channel Five. She reached for her beer and the movement of her arm lifted, then closed, the view. We sat watching the news. Never on Sunday never showed up.

“Maybe the soundtrack was going to be on the radio,” I said.

“I thought it was too new for TV.” She tilted the beer can all the way back. “Guess I won’t stay up. Too good a night for sleeping anyway.”

“Every night’s a good night for sleeping.”

“Even that gets hard on the back,” she said.

“I never have any trouble,” I lied.

“Six-thirty comes early,” she said. She shuffled towards her room, then turned. “So you got a regular job like a regular guy,” she grinned.

“I’m a worker.”

“Well, well.”

April 28, 1964

The brewery sprawled huge across three industrial blocks. It was red brick, like Misery, but taller, and workers were free to come and go. At the entrance gate to the yard, the amber smell of cooking grains sifted down through the ring of cyclone fence. Men in blue twill stood smoking near the time clock, jowls grizzled from the third shift, but scrubbed fresh in the workers’ shower.

I waited near them, glad to be in from the morning cold, listening to their words, trying to find what was to be expected in another new segment of my life. I would make a go of this, the same as my new school. I had to know what I was. I had to push myself in every direction. I had functioned well in the sweet security of the Church, claiming I had a vocation only God could under­write.

I had to know if I had self-reliance, on my own, nothing mystical to fall back on. No terrible sweet ecclesiastical security to remove the ordinary tensions of existence. I willed to worry about food and a roof. Every new meeting made me further incarnate in the world.

I watched the men each push his timecard into the clock. Chunk-ping! They were faces marked by their lives, same as everyone else. On Ordination days when the new priests’ brothers came, I always wondered at the telling differences life, not heredity, wreaked. Two brothers with the same bland faces as babies grow up marked with a difference, because the one sells used cars and the other says Holy Mass. The lay brother’s skin is different, creased in premature lines, like my brother Thom’s, about mouths and eyes that have tasted and seen and coped with the stress of real life. If it weren’t for their vocation, I knew seminarians who’d stand in this same line, chunk-pinging their days like their fathers and brothers, not getting plumper in rectories claiming to be gourmet chefs. They flashed the ID of their priestly vocation like a passport exempting them from the slow-ticking clock on the factory wall. No one, not even Rector Karg, Papal Chamberlain, not even the Pope, the new one, Paul VI, could tell if they were palming off a forgery of a vocation. Where spirituality leaves off and social climbing begins is a thin red passive-aggressive line.

I was led deep into the innards of the plant, a movie set right out of Metropolis that I’d seen at the Chicago Film Society. In the section producing malt syrup only the center of the rooms was lighted. The walls receded into murky darkness. Half the malt building was storied, floor above open floor, with the steel skeletal anatomy of the cannery. Empty tin cans rattled down forever, cause and effect, from the third floor to the carousel spigots on the second where they were flushed full of syrup, lidded and cooled, whipped through a labeling chute and stacked automatically twelve on their sides, still warm, ready to be pushed by a button into a cardboard carton held by a man who started the boxes through the sealer, its brush tongue and harrowing lips gluing and folding the flaps down hard, pressing the boxes against the rollers moving toward the final chute to the busy shipping dock.

The rest of the building was open-storied like a Spanish mission built around an internal plaza, jammed with furnaces and boilers and copper tubing. Vats from the basement, explosive with pressure, flowed up to the second floor, their small openings steaming in the close hot air. Piping raveled through them like catheters rinsing steel patients. Everything was connected, explicit, unlike the Byzantine tunnels and pipes under Misery. Brown sacks of flaked green-yellow hops stacked in acrid bunkers stood ready for brewing. Periodically, tugging men emptied them into the small mouths of the vast pressure cookers that exploded in heat and steam and froth churning a full story high. They flushed the crude syrup up through the swollen tubing to a black steel hop-jack for rinsing and cooling, then drained it down, dropping it a floor to twin one-story vats separated by a catwalk, there to lay for final straining and cooling before canning.

That first day was like all first days for the new guy, isolated, abandoned, nobody loves me, consigned to the shit-work high on the catwalk. At least I was new. At least I was a guy. Fifty feet above the floor, vertiginous, alone on a small platform, learning to be one of the boys, I had to turn three-foot water valves from flow to ebb and back again on tanks as big as a school bus. Angel of God, my Guardian dear. I was standing on top of a kettle in hell, making thick tea by sloshing a thousand gallons of water back and forth through two tons of soggy tea leaves. Turning water into beer. The screen baskets of the final seining filled with a brown wet sawdust steaming like hot dung. The boiling brew, falling through the seine, bubbled down from the hop-jack hissing in wet clouds from the small door opening into the huge tank which I had to climb into with a shovel to scrape out the last waste. If not a worker-priest, a worker. Many men feared climbing into the small hole of the big tank. I was big. I was tough. Liar. That’s why I got the job. I feared nothing, because nothing was more claustrophobic than Misery.

As the last syrup trickled into the tanks, I climbed a twenty-foot ladder, like Tony Curtis in Trapeze, leading straight above to the hop-jack where most of the waste had settled. A man stood beside it waiting for me, the first time. His cap was pulled down to his eyes and he seemed to have no face. He had an immense potbelly. A worker could drink as much as he could hold. He wore a see-through white nylon sport shirt that buttoned tight across his chest. My chest had strengthened at the YMCA. He motioned me to watch. He turned on the cold water to flush the heat from the hop-jack waste. He said nothing and I felt awkward, the two of us standing like acrobats on a platform, waiting, high above the rest of the plant. Finally he motioned for me to climb higher up the next ladder. I had to do it. Below me was all the world. I had to prove I could function where Rector Karg’s Holy Mother Church was no net to catch me. I peered down at him.

He smiled beneath his cap. He placed his hand sideways in his crotch, drove his fingers in flat, index finger up, and pulled his hand out loosely and snapped it from the wrist as if flinging sweat from his fingers. He shook his head side to side, laughing, boy-o-boy. He was making like my buddy signaling me we were both hot and tired. He was telling me I was doing okay. Then he motioned me on, to enter the jack.

I peered in through the small porthole door, down at the ladder, into the steel submarine of the copper tank. From theological study to graduate school to this noisy, dangerous factory, and maybe to the war far off in Southeast Asia, I had to meet the world on its terms. That was always my point. Lots of workers become priests. I never heard of a priest becoming a worker. I looked inside the tank, pulled my work gloves on my hands, over the once-broken finger, and vowed I would make it back to Louisa’s, because the stranger, my new buddy, had given me more encouragement in one gesture than any priest.

I climbed feet first through the porthole and ten feet down the rungs of the ladder into the isolation tank of the vat. Six inches of hops waste mattressed under my new work shoes. My buddy threw a stoker’s shovel in after me. It cut through the wet heat and landed on the cushion of waste.

“Take off your shirt,” he said. He peered down on me through the small porthole at the top of the ladder. The tank was ominous with sprinkler cooling jets. In the showers of the concentration camps, a million Catholic martyrs. “Every fuck ever worked in here says it’s too goddam hot.”

His face disappeared and I was standing alone on the spent hops. I gouged an opening in the carpet of wet waste nearest the sewer trap and slugged a couple shovels down. In two minutes I was soaked through, sweating like other men. I threw my shirt over the ladder rungs, to grab it in scrambling escape should the machine begin flooding with me in it. I was not going to drown like Hank the Tank. I was in the tank and one with the tank. I worked, shoulders, arms, back, legs, to clear the serrated floor, stopping to gasp under the draft of the tiny incoming flue that smelled like the cooler brewery air of the far outside.

I leaned panting against the black walls of the tank, larger than my room at Misery where Karg had slugged me across the chest. I paced myself, laughing, knowing I was strong enough to do the job. The shiny copper floor of the tank finally gleamed spotless, flecked with a few brown flakes, like cereal dried on the rim of an unwashed bowl. My jeans were soaked. I was elated, touched sensuously by a strange fatigue of pleasure. I could make it to Louisa’s, I told myself. Dead tired, I would make it to Louisa’s. I climbed out of the tank, shirtless, laughing, popping the can of beer handed by my buddy. In the sweat running salt into my mouth, I tasted the promise of the world.

May 14, 1964

My cherry depressed Louisa all through the spring into the first of my summers among grown-ups. Lilacs in the dooryards bloomed all down our street the way I always dreamed spring would be in the world. I no longer knelt, kneecaps on wooden kneelers, in the impossible indulgent stretches of introspection. I traded mystic meditation for rational thought on buses between graduate school and the brewery and Louisa’s. I could have cared less that, back at Misery, Ordination Day was coming.

In the city, I pulled myself together, hungry for adventure. I walked the night streets of the Loop, eating up the downtown lights of the huge marquees of the brilliant movie palaces, wanting life as perfect and big and sweeping as a wide-screen movie, hoping history would happen to me, doubting it would, buying front-row seats to see Albert Finney in Tom Jones downtown and in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning uptown, double-billed with Richard Harris in This Sporting Life at the Bryn Mawr. The British invasion was everywhere. The Beatles were coming to the Amphitheater.

“You’re begging for it,” Louisa said. She was making me a cottage-cheese salad.

“My father once told me,” I said, “that anticipation is greater than the actual thing.”

“Then your mother must be a lousy lay.”

“Hey, Lou Lou!” I said.

“Don’t call me ‘Lou Lou.’ I was kidding.”

“Don’t insult my mother.”

“We’re all virgin saints, us mothers,” Louisa said over the refrigerator door. “I’m going away for two weeks.”

“By yourself?” She wouldn’t travel with Joe.

“I’m not telling where I’m going.”

“Don’t put lettuce under my pineapple.”

“Don’t get smart,” she said.

“Who’s getting smart?”

“Men. Males, whatever ages.”

Good. I warmed at her thinking me like all other men. I was changing.

“They ought to do with men like they do with girls in China.”

“What?”

“Take ’em out and drown ’em.”

“What a waste.”

“Don’t get smart or I’ll give you your rent back.”

“Louisa.” I said her name strong as Joe. “What’s the matter? What do you really want?” I tested only her honesty.

She licked her thumb, glancing my question away from her privacy. “A millionaire who’ll give me two hundred a month and be gone all the time. No sex allowed. That’s the perfect husband.”

“‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ ain’t your song. Put my pineapple on top of my cottage cheese.”

“Don’t be funny. I’m miserable enough.”

“You know, if I’d met you another time another place, we could have had a good laugh.”

“Not me, dolly. I’m nothing but a miserable b-i…do you want me to spell it?”

“No.”

“Then quit trying to hear my Confession. You left the seminary. God! There’s hot dogs for supper and Jewish rye I bought. Why don’t you get a girl—the poor thing—but get a girl for godsake. Call Miss Ticket Booth.” She stared at me. “Get yourself loved…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“…and get loved in return.”

“Like you and Joe? That’s the secret?”

“That’s the ticket.”

“Is that theology?”

“Ain’t it the movies?”

She wiped her hands clean on her apron.

“Do you have any sauerkraut, Louisa?”

“In this house? This ain’t Germany.”

“You can get it at the A&P.” I wanted to say for Chrissakes. I sounded like Joe. She had sucked me into her movie.

“I told you anything you want, pick it up. But you’re probably not too hot at picking anything up.” She slung the salad into the refrigerator. “You might as well never left the seminary. You live exactly the same. Study and work. You never go anyplace. Not like my boys.” She untied her apron. “I’m going to lie down. You can put your own hot dog on. I understand boys,” she said. “I understood mine and all their friends.” She took a can of beer from the refrigerator. “But you!”

“Do you have another saucepan?” I said. “So what’s the matter with me?”

“I don’t want to insult your mother again.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Maybe she doesn’t love you enough.”

“Shut up, Lou Lou. You are a b-i-t-c-h.”

“Yeah, well, here.” She handed me her beer can. “These new pull-tab cans never work.” She made a face. “Here, you try, Mister Big Brewery Worker. Watch you don’t cut.”

I pulled the tab open for her and tossed the ring into the waste can.

“Boys always have understood me.” She winked. “Do you understand me?”

“I understand you.”

“Joe says you could do with a good roller-coaster ride with Miss Slammo, the girl contortionist of TV wrestling.”

“That’s dumb and clear as mud.”

“Mud covers the ground.”

May 15, 1964

I hated Louisa. She stripped my need down like a bed for washing. Something no Jesuit had ever done. Every day of the spring I thought, now today, I’ll meet the sweet girl, the one I’ll love the first. I saved so long, everything I had to give was ripe, blooming, poppable. All unknowing they competed, girls seated in classrooms, animated in halls, talking over coffee in the Union. Perfumed, wrapped in folds of cotton and silk, cupped, teased, combed, heavy with languor, small hands in white gloves, studious beneath a professor’s drone, each girl scanned, computed, sought eligible. I cruised among them, outside their sweet dimension.

A tremendous disconnected sense of being unloved, nobody loves me, crossed over me, who had words for everyone and everything at Misery, your mother doesn’t love you enough, with nothing to say to the men at work, not speaking the language of girls, with inchoate desire sounding like a prayer, Dear God, she turns me on, dreaming of them all, of a face, faceless, beautiful, pure, small white breasts, coming to me, me bending to them teaching me, heavy with desire, with vine leaves in my hair, white godlike linen wrapped crisscross, Christ’s Cross, around my loins, heavy with pure virgin love.

I thought of a boxing match at Catholic Boys Camp one summer, and Hank the Tank kicking out my teeth in football and breaking my finger, and returning more than twenty times after summers and after Christmases on busses and trains to six million tick tick minutes at Misery. I always went back for more: it took me almost five rounds to lose the boxing match, because I was rough and tough and ready to beat them all up. Louisa intuited some things about me, but she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know about the vast experiments in the South State Street dives, parlors of tattoo and pool, or about Jocelyn. When I experimented with giving up Confession, I stopped telling everybody everything.

Besides, Louisa never would have believed the gang of younger brewers, five or six, who let me tag along to Rush Street and Wells, drinking, and then four of us, come on, kid, to South State Street, stepping over winos, where we yelled, “Go-go, baby, go, go,” at the white-booted strippers bumping it out over the ancient plush seats of the burlesque theater. “Take it off, take it off!”

Very jokey, very drunk, two or three of the brewers played at playing pocket-pool in their pants and moaning and laughing and mooing like bulls, and we all palsy-walsy went running drunken out into the spring night, stopping in later at the tavern where the older whores came to play tongue tennis, and the guys, come on, kid, enrolling me in higher education, kidded them, the old whoors, all night, buying plenty of drinks, jeweling them down from twenty to five bucks a throw, until all their other prospects had stumbled out, and then laughing in the old cosmetic faces and hooting at them, Oh, sister, how much will you pay us to gangbang you?

The bartender laughed. He thought it so funny them, the old whoors, cheated out of their tricks, because the cops could arrest him for prostitution, because the gag kept everybody drinking longer and later, everybody so drunk even the old whores were laughing, because the bartender paid them to keep us all spending like drunken sailors.

At four in the morning, when the bars closed, that world, Oh, Jesus, was a cold place, Oh, Jesus, where street lights shined, Oh, Jesus, hard down on hard men hardening me.

May 20, 1964

So Louisa didn’t know about Jocelyn Jennings. She was a professional graduate student. Her course work completed, she was in the sixth year of the seven maximum allowed to write a dissertation. Hers happened to be on Virginia Woolf, who had drowned herself twenty years before. Jocelyn had bussed her torso into college from Jamestown, New York. She specialized in taking new graduate students down to a cellar jukebox bar on Rush Street to twist to Chubby Checker, and frug to Ramsey Lewis’ “I’m ‘In’ with the In Crowd,” and slow-dance to Ray Charles records, “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Ruby (You’re Like a Song).”

One night, in the group of us, she took a pen from her bag, wrote something, leaned into me, and said, “Phone me.”

I did, because hers was the first phone number I received, and she was editor of the graduate school literary magazine.

“You could get me published,” I said, “for the first time outside the Catholic press.”

“Did you notice you’re in a Jesuit university?” she said. “Everything here is the Catholic press.” She was something extraordinary among all the other well-bred girls and their blond beehive hairdos. She was tall, thin, and mysterious. Her long curlicue black hair flew loose, wild, around her face. In an instant, she could change, pulling her hair back and piling it on top her head like the women in ancient Greece, and behind her head, like Virginia Woolf herself in the photographs she had clipped from British magazines.

She was perfect for Rush Street and Old Town, where she lived at 60 East Chicago, Apartment 403, a block from the Water Tower, and a block from the Lawson Y. Many students hived together in tiny apartments. Artists and musicians and underground filmmakers hung out at the bars and coffee shops and the Russian tea room and the Cinematheque which, she told everyone, was always getting busted by the police, because the Chicago Film Review Board were all the widows of cops and politicians. She was a presence in the Student Union cafeteria, something like Urania, the earth mother, with her special chair at a special table. Everyone in graduate school seemed to know her, nod to her, suck up to her. I kept my distance at first.

We were like one of those old big-band songs of the 1940’s where the whole tune, like “Sentimental Journey,” is played through as an instrumental and finally some featured singer like Doris Day tags in at the end with the lyrics. Jocelyn and I only became vocal like that after a long period of, not flirting, but watching, studying, eye-balling each other. I missed the barracks of the seminary. I missed the Misery gossip. Jocelyn was the eye and center of everything. I missed knowing someone like that. She was the Ruler of the Union, the editor of the paper, and a favorite of the faculty.

I gave her a manuscript on J. D. Salinger. “It’s okay,” she said. We were dancing together on Rush Street to a jukebox full of 45’s, Ray Charles singing, “Georgia, Georgia.” She led me. “We have to discuss your writing. J’accuse! You were in the seminary.” We stopped dancing. “Don’t lie.”

I was a seven-year-old caught with my underwear dripping. “It shows?”

“Shows?” She shot the word back from the side of her mouth. “The ‘theology of this’ and ‘the theology of that.’ Crap. Must you see a ‘theology’ in everything? There must be a thousand ex-seminarians on this campus. You’re new, but you’re not fresh.”

“I can get fresh.”

“I mean you’re not original.”

“You want me to get fresh?”

She slapped my face. Not hard. Everybody stared. I felt like one of those chickens they crucify in Mexico and watch die, taking bets, while the stage fills up with its blood. “Georgia, Georgia.” She took my hands, lifted my arms, and pulled me into her. “Dance,” she said. I hated her. I loved her. I pushed into her. She pushed back. We danced until Ray Charles stopped singing. “What do you think of Negroes?” she said.

“They need their rights.”

“What’s your ‘theology-of’ that?”

I told her about living as a worker-priest for three months at Holy Cross parish and marching on Mayor Daley’s office with The Woodlawn Organization.

“From 63rd and Cottage Grove?”

“With Saul Alinsky.”

That was when she said, “Phone me.” That was the night she gave me her number. “Saul Alinsky, huh? Still waters run deep. We’ll discuss it.”

“It?”

“All of it.”

“Have you read Alinsky’s manifesto, Rules for Radicals?”

“I proofed the galleys.”

“Liar.”

An hour later, too eager, I called her from the elevated station near Louisa’s.

“Can I see you?”

“Tuesday at eight.”

“Shall I bring my manuscript?”

“Down, boy,” she said.

“Go get her,” Joe said.

Louisa laughed. “You’re so sophisticated. Certainly, I did not see the fifth of Southern Comfort stashed under your bed, and your handwriting is terrible.”

The thought of Louisa trying to decipher my yellow legal pads was a comedy compared to Rector Karg sniffing through my shoe box of papers word by word. Something had been stolen from me. Some secrets had not been revealed. I had escaped from Misery, a missing boy, gone in the middle of the night, and no one, no priest, no rector ever even called my parents to report me missing, or to see if I arrived home in one piece.

“Aaawgh,” Joe said, “we all waste our youth some way.”

“So us three got something in common,” Louisa said.

“Aaawgh, Queenie,” Joe said.

In the Buncheks’ attic, I stood naked, couldn’t keep my clothes on, transfixed in the mirror by who’s that? Naked, I rose, untouched. Spring blew in the window. I threw myself into my bed, tossing, planning my first literary engagement with Jocelyn, whom I thought of as my editor, Jocelyn.

“I want to introduce you,” she had offered, “to LeRoi Jones. I want to listen to you reading out loud, ‘An Agony. As Now.’”

In my Journal, I wrote the declarative sentence Jocelyn had told me was the declarative truth of the declarative Virginia Woolf: “What secrets men know are revealed through women.”

I was determined to be like other men, and learn the secrets I had always missed in all the other inner circles of boys.

Tuesday I stood, early outside her address, her salon, her apartment, her two rooms, for fifteen minutes, in the dark, under the lamplight, actually lit by the bright light of the Communist bookstore on the first floor of her building, looking up through the curtains of her window, four floors up, watching her arranging flowers she had bought herself. “I always buy my flowers myself,” she had said. She saw me, shook her head, and waved me up.

“You’re laughing at me,” I said.

“Never.” She ushered me through her door. “My roommate is out,” she said. “Does that make any difference to you?”

“Should it?”

“Cary Grant,” she mocked me, “come in.” She received me in one of those Breakfast at Tiffany’s black hostess outfits with long pants and a long skirt open in front, where you’d notice, pocket to pocket.

I squeezed past her in the narrow hall. She handed me one of the two glasses of wine in her hands. She smiled, closed the door, and leaned against it. “You’ve never seen anybody do this before,” she said.

“What?”

“Lean back against the door.”

“Nobody in real life.”

“Darling,” she said, flagging a hand from her chest out to arm’s length where a finger wriggled at me, “you’ve never seen real life.”

“Yes, I have,” I said to contradict her. “But I’ve never seen a movie where a woman closed a door without leaning on it.”

She looked annoyed, baubles, bangles, bright shining beads, then recouped. “You need a…big glass of wine. Drink up.” She swung easily by me. She wore one earring, gold and pendulous, that told true gravity even as she rushed to fall posturing on the couch. “Sit down, oh, please, sit down, do,” she said. “Welcome to my movie.”

I wanted to ask who she thought she was, and who she thought I was.

“What movie am I?” she asked.

“What movie are you?”

“Darling, I’m Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon.”

“Never heard of her.”

“I’m Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof.”

“Very funny. That’s not Tennessee Williams.”

“That’s the Kuchar brothers.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Darling, underground film. Experimental cinema. Don’t you know anything about the avant garde?”

“At Misery, I was the avant garde.”

“Darling, I must take you to the Cinematheque.”

“Don’t make me feel ignorant.”

“This is how the world opens up. New words. Discotheque. Dancing to records, discs. Cinematheque. Cinema, movies. Like Bibliotheque. Library, books. You told me you loved words. You told me you love movies.” She handed me a sheet of screening dates and times, with photos, and titles like Little Stabs at Happiness and Fireworks and Scorpio Rising. “Wonderful films by artists, not studios. Flaming Creatures and The Sin of Jesus…”

“You can’t scandalize me.”

“I’m practically on the selection committee at the Cinematheque. You’ve seen Second City? Yes? No? Oh. In fact, I’m polishing up shooting notes, as an appendix to my dissertation, for an improvisational film of Orlando, a novel by Virginia Woolf…”

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“…that’s something else again, that play, but my film, I mean, will this graduate faculty ever catch up? I want to direct, but a film, even an underground film, takes money. Do you have any money?”

“Me?”

“You look rich.”

“I just spent $480,000.”

“Don’t kid a kidder.”

“Why are you at this school?” I asked.

She sipped her wine. “Virgins.”

“Virgins?”

“Catholic boy virgins. Like you.”

“I’m not a virgin. Stop trying to scandalize me.”

“I have a fetish for Catholic boys.”

“I’m not a virgin.”

“How does it feel to be a fetish?”

“What’s a fetish?

She went ha ha ha. Her mouth went ha ha ha. Her hair went ha ha ha. “You reveal yourself in your writing,” she said. “You must be careful ha ha ha.”

“Why? Writers are, like, strippers, revealing themselves ha ha ha.” I said it, but her mouth and hair made me say it, revealed me saying, Hemingway was, and was not, The Old Man and the Sea.

“True.” She pretended to weigh her words, trebling wine on her tongue. “Unless a writer comes out and says, I mean, really makes the personal explicit, ‘this is me’ or ‘what happened to me,’ well, the reader can hardly know what is an autobiographical act, or what is manufactured.”

“Fiction.”

“Your essay exposed you ha ha ha as an ex-seminarian.”

“A former seminarian. I’m a former seminarian.”

“What’s the diff?”

“An ex-seminarian is one who didn’t get over it.”

“Humph! Jesuit! I hope you didn’t mind my grilling you in the Student Union.”

“No.”

“How did you find it? I’m curious.”

“The grilling?”

“The seminary. I think you were there a very long time. How over it are you?”

Her apartment was one of those semi-furnished flats fitted out with odds and ends. The orange couch, where she enthroned herself, sitting with her feet up, her knees folded under her, all in black, was the center of the room. Piles of cushions scattered in small archipelagoes across the floor. She said furniture was bourgeois, and marriage, and religion, and how did I like sitting cross-legged as a beatnik in a beanbag chair?

Behind her, in blue, greens and yellows, a print on textured cardboard, of a painting, “by Carrington,” she said, a portrait, head and shoulders, of a florid young man, “you notice, but, of course, you think you look like that, romantic, a lover, painted by a woman,” a prize, British, imported, from the bins of textured cardboard paintings sold at Barbara’s Book Store in Old Town.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m, uh, trying to be honest.”

“As an artist,” she said, “I’m interested in faces, portraits, films cast from life, faces, not actors, real people, and real writing, personal, reflexive.”

At Misery, I could have projected her, Jocelyn Jennings herself, face and body, from real dreams. I had known her apartment, if not her, already far back, distracted by Plato in Misery’s chapel, dreaming about a Greenwich Village garret. I was not disappointed she was so literary, so bohemian, so free, so pretentiously beyond the pretenders preening in the Misery opera and chant society.

“I was in the seminary longer than most murderers are in prison, but don’t get me wrong, as fub duck…”

“Fub duck?”

“…fucked up as it was, it was one of the most positive experiences of my life.”

“What did they do to you?”

“They never did anything to me.”

“They never touched you?”

“They never touched me.”

“Maybe not your body.”

“I tried, really, to be creative, find myself, get the most out of it.”

“Hasn’t every boy in a seminary, everyone thinks, presumes they, you…”

“No.”

“Perhaps, not you.”

“Not me. Definitely.”

“And you’re jealous ha ha ha that they didn’t do…you, choose…you.”

“Ha ha ha. One day I discovered I’d milked the experience dry. I’d learned, taken, everything they had to give, and shined it back at them. The priests had no more to offer me. I had to leave, and fast, or watch my creativity,” I wanted to say, my very self, my soul, my life, “curl up and die. As simple as that.”

“But what did they do to you?”

“They gave me drugs.”

“Priests are not doctors.”

“They said I made myself nervous.”

“Darling,” she said deliberately, sitting up, “you didn’t leave the seminary. You left the Dark Ages.”

I could touch this worldchild. Grace could still work through me. She could introduce me to the world, and I her to heaven. Oh, God, shut me fub duck up. Spinning, falling, rising, lying, hoping, begging, pretending, faking, wanting to fall into all the troubles of the flesh, the glories, sitting cross-legged, containing myself, wanting not knowing what, everything, from her.

“You’re positively Gothic,” she said. “At least you’re making yourself up.” She rose. “We had an ex-seminarian up here to dinner last week. He acted like we were going to rape him. He sat there, on the couch, right on the edge, his knees together.” She lit a cigarette. “I guess he thought he ought to go out with the girls. Priests are such boys, such…virgins.” She smiled at me, really smiled, looking for all the world like everything I’d never seen. “Care for another drink?” she asked. I heard every apple in Eden fall.

I pushed my package of Southern Comfort towards her. “It’s a house gift.”

“Thanks,” she said, “wine’s my limit. Yours too. Stand up.” She poured the wine into our glasses. “Can you manage the stereo? I’ve stacked six or seven LPs. You know how to manage the stereo, don’t you? You lift the arm, set it on the lip of record, and make sure the needle rides on into the groove.”

“Lauren Bacall. To Have and Have Not.”

She kissed her finger and put her finger to my lips.

I dropped the record already set on her phono­graph, and turned up the low, surging Mikis Theodorakis’ soundtrack to the movie, Phaedra, so popular at the Bryn Mawr theater, crashing violins, deliberate picking guitars, soothing, the huge crisp black-and-white faces of Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins and Raf Vallone playing Aristotle Onassis erasing the faces of Karg and Gunn and all the priests and all the sweet, sweet nuns.

Melina Mercouri’s deep voice, silken as cigarette smoke curling around grape leaves, saying over the music track to Tony Perkins, “Falcon of the cold north. Eagle of solitude. I give you milk and honey. You give me poison.” Oh, if the priestlings could see this occasion, this Jocelyn Jennings, this living occasion of sin, ah, not sin, they’d scream perdition and mortal sin, yes, mortal, not venial, mortal sin, and ruin, lovely ruin. I stood ready, waiting my cue, waiting the director to call “action,” but there was no director, and no action, and I stood embarrassed by the phonograph, breathing with the recorded actors’ voices speaking now and again over the music, watching Jocelyn Jennings watch me, silken cigarette smoke rising through her hair, listening to the music.

“Lovely,” she said, meaning the music, watching me. All the stuff of seduction surrounded us, but something was amiss. I smiled ha because we felt ha ha nothing for each other ha ha ha. I mean I. Not her. Who knew about her? What the virgin-slayer really felt? The whole charade made me suddenly sad. My spirits nose-dived. How could I make the first time, so long saved, be perfectly right? My breath came short. Get it over with. Maybe it didn’t need to be right; maybe it only needed to happen: no plot, no props, one take.

The room was hot, “too hot for May, don’t you think, maybe it’s not the heat, but the humidity.”

Sometimes people panic.

Sometimes a glass or two of wine turns out to be cheap wine, sangria, even, in a jelly glass, with a record playing, scratched, even, and the apartment, a far cry from Misery’s luxury, fifty bucks a month, and all the stuff, phoney stuff, a reproach, going down the old evolutionary ladder, and the record turning, the clock ticking, and actors saying lines, written lines, scripted lines, about wasted lives and time lost, and the other person keeps on being glamorous, not noticing that sex, lurid, bumping sex has reared up in the room, wrestled itself around, hardened itself, denying, desiring, delaying, coming undone, scared, spent, thankful, happy to get out alive.

“So you liked Phaedra?” she asked over her glass.

“Yes.”

We listened for a while not speaking, she smoking, until the record finished Side Two. I said I had to go, and left her my manuscript. At her door, searching for ignition, I asked, “Maybe, that is, if you’re not busy or anything, we could go out Saturday night. To a movie or something.”

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

“Not even a virgin to the Cinematheque?”

“Another time.”

“Oh, sorry…”

“Ryan, that’s not a ‘no.’”

June 20, 1964

Summer struck with new classes and thunderstorms. Lake Michigan rose and fell with a week of seiche that ripped the beach raw, crashing waves against the huge boulders protecting Loyola’s Lakeshore Campus. Huge walls of water rolled in every ten hours, big as tidal waves. Between bossa nova cuts from the new Getz/Gilberto Verve album with Astrud singing “The Girl from Ipanema,” the radio warned everyone away from the beaches of Lake Michigan where lifeguards stood watch. Even the constant Chicago wind could not relieve the humidity. The suck and pull of barometric pressure, rising and falling, teetered always on the edge of cyclone and tornado.

I retreated to Louisa’s attic, studying late, feeling unloved and lost, listening to Stan Getz’ saxophone mix “Desafinado” with the piano of Antonio Jobim and the guitar of João Gilberto. I hated the House of Lou Lou. She thought me like other men the way the priests had thought all vocations were the same. I hated me in her house. She was too personal. I wanted to escape from my past to my future. I stopped going to Mass. I thought of Ted in that grade-school nun’s story, how he committed a sin with his girl and died in a car crash. The fires of hell got him, but at least he got the girl. The priests taught that girls were the main occasion of sin, but girls treated me almost formally, as if they and the world had not exactly been waiting for me to show up.

Could the world feel what I could not feel? At Misery, I had felt compassion for the world, but in the world, I lost empathy toward everyone, victims in burning buildings and children with cancer and people in ghettos, slipping and sliding since Jack died in Dallas, six months out of Misery, having gained the world and lost my soul. I wrote in my yellow legal pads those old lines of Wordsworth that “the world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in Nature that is ours.”

On the lonely sands of Edgewater Beach, where Lake Michigan rolled up to the neighborhood of apartments where I looked for rooms to rent, no girl dappled with sun rose from the waves. I was doomed to innocence. No sweet girl would ever appear. I’d stayed too long at Misery, and she had become lost, or impatient, or whatever happens to women whom priests’ celibacy declines. At least Lock, one New Year’s when he was in Cuba, had a real choice when a woman had said to him, “Give me an hour with you in a room and I’ll change your mind about being a priest.” After eleven years, I had nothing.

I had been Seduced and Abandoned, the title of the Italian movie at the Bryn Mawr. That’s what movie Hank would have said I was. Maybe I was lucky. In California, in some Marine Corps hospital, Sandy Gully handed my brother, Thom, a baby, a second baby, a third baby, triplets, the curse of the Irish triplets that ran in our family. Thommy named the babies Abraham, Beatrice, and Siena. Abe, Bea, and Sie. Our six-year-old sister, Margaret Mary, star of wonder, was furious enough to want to run away. Thommy was twenty-two, way ahead in life, way ahead of lucky me.

I avoided Louisa, suspecting her wise eyes could see I wanted to move out. I saw more of Jocelyn. We borrowed Joe’s car, his Lincoln, take it, kid, to drive to Ravinia’s evening concerts on the grass. We walked to the movies the way I thought it would be. Summer evenings after the brewery, after classes, after the library, I came more and more to her apartment, taking blankets over to the beach.

“Sidney Poitier gave me goose bumps in Lilies of the Field,” Jocelyn said. “That body. No shirt. His smile. Negroes are so sexy.”

“I can’t compete with Poitier,” I said, “but there’s no nuns like the ones he helped. They prayed and hung medals all over the desert, and pretended they were experiencing a miracle, but they all knew it was him that built their chapel for them, not the archangel Gabriel.”

“Always so analytical,” she said. “I’m cold.”

I put my arm around her. The rising moon hung low out over the still Lake. Somewhere far behind us an elevated train rattled late up the rails toward Evanston. The night was quiet. She lay back on the blanket. I folded next to her, over her, like Burt Lancaster up on elbow over Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.

“I’m cold,” she said.

My arm covered her gently swelling chest. Her ear lay cuplike near my mouth, tasting the sweetness of her hair. “I’m cold too.”

“Your legs are quivering.”

“We’re crazy. But you’re sweet.” I nuzzled her ear, wondering was she really too cold and maybe wanting to go, or was she the kind of too cold that was an invitation to hold her.

“How long have you been out?” she said.

“You’re cute, you know.”

“How long since you left the seminary?” She pushed me away.

“Six months.”

“Have you dated much?”

“Of course, selectively.”

“Anyone besides me?”

“One or two others. An army.”

“Anyone besides me? Come on.”

“Fffub!” I hesitated. She’d think me a punk. “Of course.”

“I don’t believe it.” She laughed and lay back.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

I thought the unsayable thing, judged it, reached out my hand, placing it over her breast. “Believe it,” I said.

She did not push me away. I was uncertain. Was one thing two things again? One to her, another to me? We lay together a long while, not moving, not talking. From somewhere a dog trailing its leash rooted by, circled us, some kind of hunting dog because it stood, looked at us, and pointed.

“Bang-bang,” she said.

I rose part way up, not moving my hand, joking in my best German accent, “Meine liebe fraulein, do not tell me you are part of the resistance.”

She pulled me to her. “Cherie, I have never resisted anything.”

I felt those vine leaves growing through my hair.

My legs quivered. Would she notice?

“I’m a passionate French woman.”

Oh my God! I felt the lump of myself growing towards her.

Her mouth fit agreeably to mine, different from the soft kisses at her door. She frightened me with her teeth against my lips.

“No one understands all of me,” she said. “But you’re a man. An innocent man. Perhaps you can.”

In gratitude I kissed her, to try it, to quiet her, to hear the truth to be found in her.

“No,” she said, “like this.”

I’m sensitive, my God.

“Don’t pucker up.”

Hypersensitive.

“Relax your lips.”

Oh.

“I always pick flowers myself.”

No one can save everything so long…

“We’re too intellectual.”

…and not be easily disturbed.

“We need to feel.”

I pulled her to me.

“Like this.”

I pulled her in close.

“Like this.”

I tightened my arms around her.

Her arms tightened around me.

I hurt with undecided tension. I wanted and did not want. Song lyrics rushed through me. “Quiet nights. Quiet stars.” Astrud Gilberto, “Corcovado, Oh, How Lovely.” The lake and moon and sand and stars, the city, the world fell back from us lying in the late darkness. Under the thin lisle stretches of her swimsuit, I felt her warm white body like a night-blooming orchid. My nature quivered through me. Other men would take her, would have taken her long before. I was like other men. I wanted to slip deep down into her, into the idea of her, to be lost forever.

She knew my nature. “Ryan, oh, Ryan. We’re more than intellect.” She touched me. “Let me make you feel.”

I was in a new world…

“Let me love you.”

…on a beautiful beach…

“Let me breathe your breath…”

…faced with the mortal sin…

“…and breathe back into you.”

…that could make me fully human.

Swept away, I rose to my knees, vine leaves curling down from my hair, around my chest and arms, lifting her effortlessly, she gasped, half-laughing, half-loving the gesture, like a lake dance on the sand, like King Kong carrying Fay Wray, like Hercules lifting a beautiful girl, feeling some old miraculous Jesus out walking on the water, all white and glowing with starlight, smiling, winking, like Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett, I lifted her, carrying her clinging into the lake, the cooling water rising on my thighs, she murmuring, oh love, oh love, invoking love, the water rising around us, her legs locking in the vine leaves around my waist, in so deep the surface of the flat water spread out a dark saucer around us, night and moon and city lights, swirling, she sat on my thighs, her arms given over, around, cooing love, love, love, fuck, fuck me do, her hands fluttering like little fish, touching, holding, squeezing me, shorting out, trying not to think of Hank the Tank drowning, how it must have been like this, wet, and so I saw him, Tank, panicked, breathless, going down once, floating, spouting, going down twice, spurting, lost, pumping the cold water, drowning, her, breathless, floating, laughing, her arms and legs twined around, veined around me, the sense of being not myself, of turning inside out, forgetting her, forgiving her. Oh, love, love, she cried, slowing, tendering care. I did not, could not, was not like other men. Something held me blank, blanked out, blanketed. I could give myself to nothing, not even this, this, this ultimate act of creativity, this drumming tribal demand, this pleasure, this beautifully mortal sin. I could give myself to nothing all the way. Oh, she said, love me, and, oh, please, she said, hold me, and let me, she said, hold you, and she was perfect, and I was emptied of lust but not desire, starting to tickle her, to bring her up out of any misconception, beginning a laugh, slowly, coaxing her, shivering in the water, the cold up to our necks, cooing her head to quiet on my shoulder, loving her for what she was, no matter what, steadying her head, palming her hair close to me. Hold on, I said holding her tightly, hold on, hold your breath, and I sank us both inches below the surface. The dark water was cold, but she did not fight to come back up. My thumb signed her forehead with a Cross and I thought the words of Baptism, In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. I stayed under, held us both under, as long as I thought we could both hold our breath.

“Jesus!” She gasped for air, came up clawing at me, slapped me hard across the face.

We swam and waded toward the beach through the warm night air, dressed silently, quickly, and one went one way, and the other, the other.

At Louisa’s, standing alone on the dark porch, I banged on the door. She came in her wrapper. “What in the world,” she said through her sleep.

“I lost my key,” I said.

“Men,” she said. “You’ve been up to something.”

“Nothing.”

“You all lie.” She yawned. “I don’t believe a word men say.”

“I don’t lie.”

“You! I don’t believe a word you say.” She rocked with sleepiness, talking in her sleep. “You!” One of her eyes opened wide, wider, widest, malocchio, evil eye.

“What?”

“You lie like a rug.”

“I never lie.”

“I’ve read in your shoe box.”

“Bitch.”

“B-i-t-c-h, I may be. But, kiddo, I know what they did to y-o-u.”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.” Her wrapper parted between her breasts, opening down her torso. “Liar! Liar!”

I backed away from her up the stairs. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked, waiting for no answer, treading on up to her attic, packing my suitcase, lying alone on the bed, grasping hold of myself, hanging on, interfering for dear life.

.