The Good Life by Erin McGraw Read Free Book Online Page B

the paper.
Peculiar notion, for a man who wants to be a priest
.
    They didn’t know how to
think
. Presented with the inexhaustibly rich world, all its glory, pity, and terror, they managed to perceive only the most insipid pieties. If he asked them to discuss the meaning of the crucifixion, they would come back with
Suffering is a mystery, and murder is bad
. Father Murray looked at the paper before him and with difficulty kept from picking up his pen and adding
Idiot
.
    He had planned on spending no more than two hours grading and then going over to the track to put in a couple of overdue miles. But flat-footed student prose and inept, flabby, half-baked student logic had worked him into a silent fury, and the fury itself became a kind of joy, each bad paper stoking higher the flames of his outrage. He reached compulsively for the next paper in the stack, and then the next, his left hand snagging another of the cookies he’d taken last night from the kitchen. They were not good—lackluster oatmeal, made with shortening instead of butter—but enough to keep him going.
What makes you think
, he wrote,
that Kant’s age was any less complex than yours?
    Still reading, he stretched his back against the hard office chair, which shrieked every time he moved, and started to count off the traits lacked by the current generation of seminarians: Historical understanding. Study skills. Vocabulary. Spelling. From down the hall he heard a crash and then yelps of laughter. “Oh, Alice!” someone cried. Father Murray closed his eyes.
    A month ago one of the students had sneaked into the seminary a mannequin with eyelashes like fork tines and a brown wig that clung to its head like a bathing cap. Since then the mannequin had been popping up every day, in the showers, the library, at meals. Students mounted it on a ladder so that its bland face, a cigarette taped to its mouth, could peer in classroom windows. Now a campaign to turn the mannequin into the seminary’s mascot was afoot. Savagely, Father Murray bit into another bad cookie, then stood, inhaled, and left his office.
    At the bend in the hallway, where faculty offices gave way to dormitory rooms, five students clustered beside an open door. The mannequin, dressed in towels, half reclined in the doorway to Quinn’s room. Blond, morose Quinn, a better student than most, tugged the towels higher up the mannequin’s bosom. The customary cigarette had fallen from the doll’s pink plastic mouth and now dangled by a long piece of tape. “You should have seen your
face
,” Adreson was saying to Quinn. Father Murray knew and loathed the sort of priest Adreson would become: peppy, brain dead, and loved by the old ladies. “I thought you were going to faint. I thought we were going to lose you.”
    â€œJumped a foot,” added Michaels. “At least a foot.”
    â€œWent up like a firecracker,” Father Murray suggested, and the seminarians turned, apparently delighted he had joined them.
    â€œA Roman candle,” Adreson said.
    â€œLike a shooting star,” Father Murray said. “Like a rocket. Like the
Challenger
. Boom.”
    The laughter slammed to a halt; Adreson stepped back, and Father Murray said, “You men sound, in case you’re interested, like a fraternity out here. I would not like to be the one explaining to the bishop what tomorrow’s priests are doing with a big plastic doll. Although I could always tell him that you were letting off some steam after your titanic academic struggles. Then the bishop and I could laugh.”
    â€œShe fell right onto Brian,” Adreson murmured. “Into his arms. It was funny.”
    Father Murray remembered a paper Adreson had written for him the year before, in which Adreson had called Aquinas “The Stephen Hawking of the 1300s,” not even getting the century right. In that same paper Adreson had made grave reference to “the Ax of the