Paul Theroux - My Secret History

He said, “If I go in, will you watch me?”

I must have looked bewildered. I did not want to ask him why, but he sensed the question.

He said, “Because I can’t swim.”

He changed in the locker room — I gave him a locker — and he returned to the beach. He did not swim. He waded in and lay back and floated for a moment; and then he stood up and the water streamed down his body and his black trunks. It wasn’t swimming, and it wasn’t a dip. It was more like a baptism.

“A lot of fishermen don’t know how to swim. It’s deliberate. There’s less agony if their boat sinks. They just go down with it. That’s the way I’d want it.”

His eyes glittered as he spoke. He looked happy again, and a little healthier — it was past noon.

“Oh, I’m just wasting your time,” he said.

I laughed at the way he put it — wasting my time!

When he was gone, I told the lifeguard and the policeman he was a priest. They said, “Cut the crap, Andy.”

It made me admire Father Furty all the more to think they did not believe me.

Father Furty had a whiskery off-duty look, and his Hawaiian shirt flapping over his black priest’s trousers, and the way his loafers squeaked today, made him seem relaxed and thankful. A hot day in this part of Boston — we were just getting out of his Chevy on Atlantic Avenue — was made hotter by the soft tar bubbling around the cobblestones, the dazzle of car chrome in traffic, and the smell of red bricks and gasoline. Speedbird was tied up at Long Wharf, among the fishing boats and other cabin cruisers. The high sun was smacking and jangling the water.

My mother had said, “Who’ll be on the boat with you?”

I didn’t mention Tina. I had told her that I did not know, which was a good thing, because there were ten ladies from the Sodality, and if my mother had known she would have felt left out.

They wore dresses and blouses and hats and big blue clumping shoes, as they had before. Besides Mrs. DuCane, Mrs. Corrigan, Mrs. Prezioso, Mrs. DePalma and Mrs. Hogan, with the same picnic dishes they had brought on the last outing, there was Mrs. Palumbo with Swedish meatballs, Mrs. Bazzoli with a basin of coleslaw, Mrs. Skerry with a fruit basket and a loaf of Wonder bread, Mrs. Hickey with a homemade chocolate cake, and Mrs. Cannastra with two bottles of purple liquid that looked like Kool-Aid.

Mrs. DuCane asked what it was.

“Bug juice,” said Mrs. Cannastra.

“Poor Edda Palumbo,” Mrs. Hickey said. “God love her. She lost her husband to a tumor.”

“What’s your name, honey?” Mrs. Hogan said.

“Tina Spector.”

“You got a mother here?” Mrs. Hogan was confused.

Tina just shook her head and blushed.

“Give me a hand separating these cheese slices.” And Mrs. Hogan showed her bony teeth. “You like Velveeta, dear?”

Tina was recruited: she became one of the women, and because she was there I noticed how smooth and pink her skin was, and how the rest of the women were furry-faced, and had downy cheeks, and some had bristles.

I had not mentioned Tina to my mother. She knew Tina was a non-Catholic; she would have misunderstood and been suspicious, and after a while she would have resented it and blamed me and said, “There are so many Catholic girls.”

Never mind religion, I didn’t even think of Tina as a girl. She was a desperate feeling in me that made my heart gasp and my throat contract: I loved her.

Meanwhile, Father Furty was saying out loud that he hoped we would have a safe trip and good weather, and then he blessed himself and I realized that he had been praying.

“Cast off,” he said next, and directed me to untie the lines from the cleats on the dockside.

The Sodality ladies all shrieked and laughed as we started away, like small girls. Tina was not among them; she stood in the shadow of the cabin, looking old and sick with worry.

“What if my mother finds out?” she had said before we boarded. “What if the Father asks me if I’m a Catholic?”

“We’ll ad-lib,” I said.

It was a Furty expression.

I was very happy. That was so rare. I had known contentment but until then not this kind of happiness. And what was rarer — I knew I was happy.

I had been raised to believe that I was bad, that most of what I did was bad, that the things I wanted were bad for me. It was not an accusation — no one barked about my badness. It was rather an interminable whisper of suggestion that I was weak and sinful, and the sense that I was always wrong. And it seemed I could never win. It was Hurry up! and then Don’t run! It was Eat! and then Don’t eat so fast! It was Speak up! and then Don’t shout!

What have you been doing? could only be answered truthfully in one way: Being bad . There was something natural and unavoidable about being bad. Being hungry was bad, going to the movies was bad, sitting and doing nothing was bad, being happy was bad; and bad turned easily into evil.

On Father Furty’s Speedbird I had the unusual feeling that I was not doing something bad, and that to me was pure joy. It was Father Furty’s influence, the way he smiled at Tina and welcomed us on board. He had a graceful way of implying that we were helping him: we were doing him a favor by being with him, and he was depending on us rather than the other way around. But I was also happy because Father Furty knew me. I had confessed to him, and though of course he would never break the seal of the confessional, he had seen my heart, and it was not the messy and sometimes imaginary bad that I was nagged about at home. No, he knew my sins and had absolved them, so it was Father Furty who was responsible for my being in a state of grace.

“Is that one of them two-way radios?” Mrs. Bazzoli said.

“Nope. That’s a one-way radio.”

She said, “Are you sure?”

Father Furty made a face. “Questions, questions,” he said. He might have been joking or angry: it was impossible to tell. “ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Do you really mean it?’ Questions like that and incessant talk are a crime against humanity.”

Mrs. Bazzoli had tucked her head down — shortened her neck — not knowing whether Father Furty was attacking her, but also taking no chances.

“ ‘Why’ is a crime,” he said, and for emphasis he shook his jowls. “ ‘Why’ is a serious crime.”

Mrs. Bazzoli cleared her throat in an appreciative way, as Father Furty reached for the radio. He turned up the volume of a Peggy Lee song and began to sing with it. He always knew the words. Something about knowing songs made him seem to me very worldly and very lonely.

“You give me fever,” he sang.

Mrs. Bazzoli shook her head and returned to the stern section of the boat, where the women had asked me to set up folding chairs.

“Is this it?” Mrs. Skerry said. “Is this all?” And she looked around, widening her eyes and touching at her bristles. “I thought there was something else about boats.”

“There’s sinking,” Mrs. Cannastra said, and sipped from her Dixie cup. She smiled and said, “Bug juice.”

Mrs. Corrigan was knitting, Mrs. Palumbo pushed her face towards a tiny mirror and pressed lipstick onto her pouty mouth. Mrs. Hickey tried to control the Herald , but the pages lashed at her head. Mrs. DuCane sat smiling with her hands in her lap.

“I didn’t realize there were so many islands out here,” Mrs. Skerry said.

We had left the inner harbor and were plowing through the speckled, oil-smeared water — boats all around us, and islands on the left and right. Plump white-bellied planes were descending overhead, making for Logan Airport. Mrs. Corrigan could see the Customs House, Mrs. DePalma could see the John Hancock, Mrs. Hickey thought she could see the Old North Church.