Kieth
Lois's brother in “Benediction”: thirty-six, seventeen years into Jesuit training, and still a year short of the priesthood.
To have been of use to her. He says he built dreams around the snapshots the family sent him, and that a man has to have something living to cling to.
The book
At a glance
- Lois's brother in “Benediction”
- Thirty-six, and seventeen years into training
- The Society of Jesus, at a seminary in eastern Maryland
- Regan, a scarred man he says he hated at first, and the sort you would want with you in a fight
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeKieth is the brother Lois goes out to the seminary to see in “Benediction.” He is thirty-six and has been in the Society of Jesus for seventeen years, which means he entered at nineteen and will not be ordained for another year. His sister has him fixed in her mind from a photograph over their mother's bureau, in which he is hollow-cheeked, young and rather pitiful, and is unprepared for the large, warm, reliable man who breaks away from a group and runs down the path to meet her holding up the skirts of his gown.
How the book draws them
- How he enteredHe tells the story reluctantly, because she asks for it. Riding all day on a train, he became certain someone was sitting across from him, and heard a voice say: “I want you to be a priest, that’s what I want.” He jumped up and cried out in front of twenty people. There was nobody in the seat.
- What he was beforeAsked whether he was religious as a boy, he says yes, he supposes he was — when he was sober. He was on the way, he says, to making a bad hash of things. A week after the train he went to the Jesuit college in Philadelphia and crawled up the last flight of stairs to the rector's office on his hands and knees.
- His argument about helping peopleLois thinks people want to feel that the person helping them has been tempted. He says that in their hearts they want to feel the other person has been weak, and that real help comes from a stronger person you respect, whose sympathy is bigger for being impersonal.
- What the order does to a manHe describes the training as an attempt to get the self-pity and the pride of will out of a man at the start, beginning with scrubbing floors, and carries the logic all the way to the grave: when one of them dies, his family cannot have him either. He is buried at the seminary under a plain wooden cross with a thousand others.
- The joke he makes about himselfLois worries she is shocking him with her opinions about the church. “You can’t shock a monk. He’s a professional shock-absorber.” He is not a monk. The place is a seminary, the men in it are Jesuits, and Lois notes that the rector calls the three of them dim old monks as a joke.
- What he does after she goesHe stands at the gate with his hand on the post and his lips half parted, saying her name aloud in a sort of wonder. Probationers passing later notice him kneeling in front of the statue by the path, and coming back after a time find him still there.