Paul Theroux - My Secret History

My mouth was full of toast, but I nodded eagerly yes.

We sat, and I listened to their banter, and I was the more excited for not understanding it, because I was so flattered to be included. I had the strong impression from their comedy, which was always a little forced and desperate, that they were outcasts, and that I was one of them. So at last I had a place at Saint Ray’s.

“Too bad you have to go,” Father Furty said, when I got up to head for the pond.

He sounded as if he meant it!

“Why not serve for me tomorrow?”

It was the only day I didn’t have a mass.

“I’ll add your name,” he said. “Listen, I’d appreciate it!”

That made it a full week of serving early masses, but I began to see a point in the routine. Instead of the masses being an interruption, the other hours in the day seemed an interruption; the masses were regular, dignified, austere and orderly on those cool bright summer mornings: the muffled church, the few people in the pews, the whispered prayers, the two tearlike droplets in the chalice; four masses, and then my second funeral.

We went to an afternoon movie, Tina and I, because I wanted to touch her. It was All That Heaven Allows , with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, and we held hands until they were so hot and sticky I was glad to let go. That year the girls wore several petticoats that filled their skirts, and Tina must have been wearing two or three because they crunched in the narrow movie-seat, I suppose it was the starch, and aroused me. I reached for her leg but her hand was there already and snatched mine away. I put my arm around her and kept it there until it went to sleep, and when I yanked it back, we knocked our heads together. The movie ended at five-thirty and we went out and were blinded by the sun on Salem Street. I had a headache, my feet were tingly from sitting. We bought ice-cream cones at Brigham’s, then I went home and had meatloaf. It was always meatloaf. I was glad that Tina had not let me touch her: there was nothing to confess except the impure thought. She had saved me.

“You’ve been smoking,” my mother said, putting her face against my hair and sniffing hard.

I denied it — it must have been the musty stink at the Square Theater.

“Where have you been?”

“After work I went to the library.”

Wasting a glorious day in God’s sunshine! she would have said if I had been to a movie. And where did you get the money? If I had told her I had gone with a girl she would have squinted at me and said Why? And she would have kept asking why until I admitted that it was a waste of money, a waste of time, and very foolish— And who is this girl?

I never dared to give the truthful answers to her questions. I lied and pretended I was telling her the truth. She glared at me like God and pretended she believed me. But she knew.

“I was looking up some information on Dante — and seeing if they had the other two books.”

Louie said, “I don’t believe you’re really reading that book.”

“Test me!” I said, and put the paperback on the table. The cover was cracked and peeling from being stuffed into my back pocket. It had the mangled look of having been read.

No one said anything — perhaps I had been too shrill. But after all my lies they had chosen to challenge me when I was actually telling the truth!

“It’s not fire at the bottom of Hell, you know,” I said, because out of curiosity — and fear — I had skipped ahead in order to know the worst. I had read the last three cantos. “It’s ice, it’s all ice — murderers are frozen in it. It’s not fire!”

They were a little impressed and a little apologetic, and I felt all the more guilty about having lied about the library.

My second funeral, Mr. Kenway’s, was eerie. I found myself thinking: One more and I get a wedding — and I warned myself not to think it.

“I didn’t know he was a Catholic,” my mother said. “He never went to mass.”

I took it that he might not have died in a state of grace. He had been old and alone. He had no family. The pallbearers were from Gaffey’s Funeral Home — I could tell by their gray gloves and black coats and pin-stripe trousers. They had brought the coffin and were waiting to take it away, to Oak Grove.

There were no tears, no sobs, the church was almost empty. I recognized the other people as those who went to most of the services — early mass, the Novenas, the Stations, and the funerals of people they didn’t know. Yet that day Saint Ray’s was sadder than if every pew had been filled with weeping, honking relatives. Father Furty and I were the chief mourners, and were not mourning. When the coffin bumped over the threshold, the sound rang throughout the church, like a loud ouch! Then the pitiful clatter of the wheels, and the organ groaning into the emptiness.

Father Furty seemed frightened. He was very silent and trembling in his midmorning frailty; his shoes squeaked in a way I associated with timidity — most of his moods were revealed by the different squeaks of his shoes.

Once again I was the only altar boy. In the still church, with the solitary coffin, I went through the routine and noticed how Father Furty’s hands trembled. He was very unsteady and walked in a toppling way. When he came over for water and wine his chalice rattled against my cruet of wine. I was in the habit of only dispensing a drop, and though he seemed to be waiting for more — clank, clank — I mechanically resisted tipping the cruet. He got his two drops and went to the tabernacle, still trembling.

It was a hot day, but he was perspiring more than usual, and his white sleeves and his collar were limp and dark with dampness, his wet hair shone in prickly points on his forehead and his neck. (My own plastic collar was slippery with sweat and kept springing out of its button and clamping itself over my shoulder.)

Father Furty’s voice quavered when he spoke directly to the coffin in Latin. He incensed it, and holy-watered it, and blessed it; but still it had a sad unpolished look and I kept thinking that Mr. Kenway’s soul might be in Bolgia Five of the Inferno, among the Grafters and Demons.

The men from Gaffey’s got up and rolled the coffin down the aisle towards the blazing doorway, and then the church was empty and smelling sadly of vigil lights and flowers.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Father Furty said, when we were in the sacristy.

Was he talking to himself? He was removing his vestments, kissing each one and mumbling a prayer as he took it off and folded it. He did this slowly, in a resigned way, and I felt like a savage, yanking my surplice over my head and tearing open the snaps — so much easier than buttons — on my cassock.

“Are you going up to the pond?”

“Yes, Father. And I’m late.”

“In that case, I’ll give you a ride.”

“I’m not that late.”

He raised his hand. It was a characteristic gesture. It meant: No problem.

He played his car radio the whole way, and at the pond he insisted on buying me a hot dog and a root beer. He said the beach looked very nice, and bought himself another lemonade. I introduced him to the policeman and the lifeguard and the matron of the girls’ locker room, Mrs. Boushay. “That’s my Buick,” she told him. “I wish I’d never seen it.” He didn’t call himself Father Furty. He stuck out his hand and said, “Bill Furty.”

“You’ve got a nice crowd here,” he said to the policeman, and he talked to the lifeguard about Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he was about to be stationed.

I hoped that they would not bring up the subject of people getting polio at the pond, and they didn’t.

Father Furty stood in his civilian clothes and gazed across the murky pond, seeming not to notice the kids in their bathing suits — swimming, splashing, running, howling, hanging on the floats, throwing sand.