Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Father Furty.”

“He’s not seeing anyone.”

An hour later, on my way to Wright’s Pond I met Magoo.

“Where are you going?” she said. I didn’t reply — I was thinking hard about Father Furty, my hands in my pockets, walking fast. Magoo said, “I might as well come along.”

She wanted to take the shortcut into the woods!

I got nervous and said, “I’ve got renal colic.”

She looked angrily at me.

“You could get into trouble,” I said.

“I didn’t do nothing!” she said, very loudly, and there was something about her bad grammar that made her seem innocent. I was afraid of her ugliness — she was fat and white and had green teeth.

Everything looked dangerous to me now, especially sex.

That night I tried again at Holy Name House. The windows were dark, and no one answered the door. But I sat on the wall nonetheless — sat there, and prayed, and felt insignificant.

At home — late for supper — I had a sense of desperation: wanting to do something and not knowing what. My mother asked me if there was something wrong. I said no.

“You’ve been smoking!” she said.

“No!”

“Don’t use that tone with me,” she said. “I sometimes think you don’t have a vocation at all. A priest wouldn’t talk that way to his mother.”

It seemed to me that what she said made sense. The way I talked to her probably meant that I didn’t have a vocation.

“What if God calls you?”

But no one called — God was like the rest of them. I was in the dark, thinking of Father Furty, missing Tina. The darkness was silent.

I dreamed of Tina standing in her underwear in front of a mirror. She was barefoot, combing her hair. I could not imagine her naked, and I doubt whether even if I could I would have found it thrilling. I liked this — sex to me was satin panties and strips of lace, it was all elastic and straps.

The following day I served another mass (Father Flynn) and thought: If God calls me I’ll go. Being a priest did not seem bad. Father Furty’s example was the proof that you could be a priest and still have a wonderful time, smoking, singing, listening to your car radio, and bombing around in a speedboat. And I had seen him at the altar during the consecration, with his eyes tightly shut, praying hard. That was the test — with his back turned to the congregation and his face in front of the tabernacle. Only the altar boy could see his face. He was a good priest.

And I also thought: If I’m a priest I won’t have to worry about those other things.

Tina in her Sears Catalogue underwear was a problem that left me feeling flustered and impatient. It would have been a relief, I felt, if someone I trusted whispered in my ear: Impossible.

All that was during mass.

Back in the sacristy, Father Flynn took off his vestments without speaking.

I coughed to give myself courage, and then said, “How’s Father Furty? All right, I hope.”

Father Flynn turned slowly. I saw his hesitant thoughts flickering on his face.

“I’ll tell him you were asking for him,” he said.

“Yes, please.”

Whispering, the priest said, “Say a prayer for him, son.”

This was the Father Flynn who had shouted, The Boss received a postcard yesterday from his brother in Ireland!

The worst of it was that Father Furty was my confessor as well as my friend. I had come to rely on his being in the confession box behind the Seventh Station on Saturday afternoons. He was not there last Saturday; he might not be there next; and my soul was growing muddier. Because he had not quizzed me much I had been able to be honest with him and tell him everything. I had stopped padding my confession with trivial sins (“Used the name of Our Lord and God in vain — three times”) and made the serious ones plainer. I had begun to feel hopeful about Holy Orders. But where was he now? My sins were mounting up — so many in fact that by being denied Father Furty as my confessor I knew only Father Furty could possibly absolve me of this many.

I had finished Dante’s Inferno , and I knew the detailed punishments that awaited sinners in Hell — whirling around, heads on backwards, stinking air, black frost, jumping reptiles, boiling blood, fiery tombs, and ice, and being chewed. I wished I had never read it.

Say a prayer for him, son! I was the one who needed prayers. I knew I was not in a state of grace. I felt guilty, and sneaky, and because I was in sin, very vulnerable.

I went on asking the priests and my folks about Father Furty. No one told me anything. I was not surprised. I felt that to be taken seriously was a privilege I had not yet earned.

Chicky DePalma and I served the ten-fifteen that Sunday.

“Where’s your gun?” he said.

“I forgot it.”

No, I had begun to feel guilty about that, too, because it was pleasure. Everything enjoyable made me feel guilty. I was trying to do penance — I did not deserve to have any fun. But it was no good; I had sinned; and I was losing count.

“I got bare pussy off Magoo again last night,” he said.

My face went hot as I pictured this dangerous sin. It wasn’t Circle Two, The Carnal: torture by tempests and high winds — that had something to do with love. Magoo’s ugliness, her shrunken anklesocks, made it a more serious sin, down among the flying reptiles.

Chicky had got to the sacristy first and had nabbed the cassock with snaps. He stood up — done already.

“Hey, did you hear Furty’s in the hospital?”

I felt numb, my fingers wouldn’t move, but I said, “Yeah,” because I did not want him to know how startled I was.

“He’s going to be all right,” I said. “It’s not serious.”

Chicky grinned at me. His grin meant: You’re kidding yourself.

“He just happens to be sick,” I said.

“Sick means drunk,” Chicky said. As he spoke, he reached into the cupboard and took out a green bottle of mass wine. He swigged some and started to laugh.

During mass I was so weak I thought I was going to faint. I felt panicky, my skin went rubbery and began to buzz; I needed help, from Father Furty. He had to save me.

There were famous altar boys. You became famous by doing something memorable on the altar — showing the enormous holes in your shoes when you knelt down — or holes in your socks; wearing cowboy boots with big heels; having an erection and telling everyone; having a laughing fit and being yelled at by the priest while he was saying mass. Franny Cresta threw up once during mass, and everyone had to sit down while a janitor mopped it up. Augie D’Agostino was famous for tripping on the altar carpet — two or three times — and actually falling on his face. My brother Louie was serving with Robert Libby the time Libby shit his pants, the most famous altar boy incident of all — how his face changed, how he panicked, how he shook a turd out of his trouserleg.

But all these would seem unimportant when I became famous for passing out on the altar — just fainting dead away at the thought of Father Furty sick in the hospital.

Trying to keep my composure, I decided to listen very carefully to the sermon.

It was one of the Pastor’s more terrifying ones, and it was about Hell — but a part of it that Dante had missed. It bothered me that the Pastor could give a sermon on Hell without mentioning Dante. It seemed that Saint Teresa of Avila had a visitation from an angel — her guardian angel. The angel said that if she continued to sin she would go to Hell, and not only that, but there was a place in Hell reserved especially for her. The angel scooped her up and rushed her to the edge of Hell and showed her. It was a box, like a slightly larger than normal oven. Every bit of it was red hot, and there was only room to kneel in it, or crouch — so she would not be able to stand up or sit down. The angel said that she would be hunched in it — stuffed in this box in the most awkward posture imaginable — and go on burning for all eternity.