Page 67
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
At Mount Mercy the child is surrounded by nuns, uniforms, girls, courtyard plays, servants, a maid at home, and weekend club life that feels proper, absurd, and faintly threatening all at once.
The strongest tension is between the polished order of school and home and the child's sense that both worlds are staging him for futures he does not want, from priesthood to jail to some dream-violence around girls and walls. Daniel's absence also matters here, because the old field freedom is replaced by managed spaces, servants, and adult schedules.
At Mount Mercy the narrator rides a little yellow bus from Morrison Drive through New Virginia Manor into 'the dirty city', sees Daniel only on weekends, endures nuns, 'danty little plays' and talk that he must become a priest or end up in jail, attends Roger Flanery The Third's lavish birthday party, and at home rings the maid's bell under the dining room table while his parents go out to clubs on weekends.
The page satirizes wealth and propriety through a child's eye, with the servants, linen bibs, and the maid's bell presented as absurd theater that the German maid quietly shares in. Religious expectation and romantic fantasy ('loving a nun who was only a girl in my dreams') appear together, hinting at the rebellion the narrator is already rehearsing.