Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Sit up straight!” the Pastor shouted from the pulpit, and everyone in the church turned to look at me perspiring.

I said to my mother, “I’ve got to see Father Furty.”

“After all that’s happened I think you should get down on your knees and say a prayer.”

Say a prayer. Get a job . Those were her usual responses when I despairingly wondered how to meet the world. Get a haircut. Take a bath. Be glad you’re not feeling worse .

“I’m worried about him.”

“You should be worried about yourself.”

“He’s in the hospital,” I said. “Chicky DePalma told me.”

My mother looked at me sharply: I had told her something she didn’t know. She sent me away and went to the phone.

“Not just in the hospital,” she said, in a triumphant tone of going me one better. “He’s on the Danger List.”

This in my imagination was a long piece of paper tacked to the hospital wall, and names printed in black, one under the other, and some crossed out.

“What hospital?”

“Morris Memorial.”

I tried to hide my desperation.

My mother said, “They certainly won’t allow you in. Not if he’s on the Danger List.”

“I’m not going there,” I said, and went to my room and took my Mossberg off the wall and filled my pocket with cartridges.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“The Sandpits.”

“I hate guns,” she said.

But instead of taking the Hudson Bus to Stoneham, I walked through the Morris Estates, the Mossberg over my shoulder. At the hospital a gardener yelled, “Hey, you!” but then thought better of it. Seeing me entering the hospital, people hurried to their cars. Father Furty would laugh when I told him that the only way I had been able to see him was by taking my Mossberg out and pretending I was going to the Sandpits to break bottles. He’d call it a fib — it was a wonderful word.

“You can’t come in here with that thing!” the receptionist said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The bolt’s out.” I rested it against the wall of the lobby.

“I’m here to see Father Furty.”

“Was he a friend of yours?” she asked in a whisper.

It was a requiem mass, all bowing and singing, two priests and six altar boys. I was one of the acolytes, holding a four-foot candle. I felt shaky and weak, as if someone had screamed “Wake up!” and slapped my face, and badly damaged it. I had woken up, and it hurt. Until then I had never known anyone who had died — no one in my family, none of my relatives or friends, not even my grandparents — all four of them were alive. This was my third funeral, but it was my first death.

From the moment I heard the bad news I was very silent. I did not speak to anyone at home — they found out the same day, so I did not have to tell them. I didn’t talk, and yet I found it easy to pray. God was still glaring at me out of the hot sky — perhaps listening, but did it matter?

“You are all-knowing, God, so you know that Father Furty was a good kind man, and his happiness was love. His happiness was a way of praying. He must have been good, because he liked me and took me on his boat. Before I met him I felt worthless and unimportant, and I—”

But I had to stop myself It was not that I was rambling, but rather that whenever I talked about Father Furty I began talking about myself. I saw that this was an unfair connection, but I nearly always made it. It was not that he was a priest — he was the first person to make me feel as though I existed in the world; he made me feel I had a right to live. He made me laugh and he laughed at things I said. I was fifteen years old, and he treated me as though I were a whole, large mature person; he listened to me; he gave me compliments and praise. That was why it was such a shock to lose him — because he had been on my side, and now there was no one.

I had never believed that such a priest was possible, and so until I had met him I had never imagined being a priest. He was better than me, but he resembled me. I had thought that I was sadder and more tormented, and that my life was more difficult than his. But he made me believe in myself as a priest; by making happiness look natural and right. I had always thought happiness was a venial sin — that it was selfish. Now when I imagined the priesthood I saw myself with a wiffle and a flowered Hawaiian shirt and black slacks and sandals, smoking Fatimas and singing along with the radio in the car.

All this was news to me, and it helped, but remembering that he was dead still made me feel sick — sick, rather than hopeless.

Chicky DePalma was in the sacristy that day talking to Walter Hogan.

He said, “I’m bombing up Brookview to the church, thinking I’m going to be late — and who do I see in a tight sweater, with knobs like this? Yeah! Hey, Parent, are you listening?”

“No,” I said.

“And a tight skirt, and I think, mingya!”

“Cut it out,” I said.

“Parent walks around with a boner all day.”

Chicky had thick lips and spaces between his teeth and hooded eyes and a heavy Sicilian jaw. Whenever he said something obscene he made his monkey mouth.

“So what do you think of Tina the Wiener coming to church with her knobs—”

I heaved myself at him and pushed him against the lockers, banging his head and yanking his cassock. “If you say one more word I’ll kick the living shit out of you!”

My threats didn’t matter, but he had hit his head very hard, and I had torn three or four buttons off of his cassock. He was startled, and hurt, and he saw that I was very angry.

“He’s apeshit,” Walter Hogan said softly.

That was a form of praise. But my reaction had startled me too and taken all my anger away. I also felt righteous — my swearing didn’t matter: I was on the side of sanctity, insisting on reverence and fighting for it. That calmed me down.

Meanwhile, another altar boy — Vito Bazzoli — had walked in. Walter whispered to him, but they said nothing directly to me. I think they were afraid of me — or respected me — at last, and I was glad.

The mass was said by the Pastor, and as it was a requiem he was assisted by Father Skerrit. Requiems always seemed to me like plays — dramas with two characters. The Pastor had the main part, and Father Skerrit had a subsidiary role, scurrying around and responding in a nervous voice to the Pastor’s pompous lines. We altar boys were on the sidelines, a thurifer, and four acolytes, and Chicky with the seven-foot crucifix.

“It’s going to be a closed coffin,” my mother had said of the wake.

There was a meaning in her voice that I did not understand. I had never thought about it before — a coffin closed or open. The dead looked so lumpy and absent with the life drained out of them. But I was sorry I could not see Father Furty again, and I kept imagining his face against the lid of the coffin.

Standing beside it with my candle I felt weak again and I knew I was conspicuously pale and trembly. This suffering was not wholly due to the fact that Father Furty was dead (but how had he died? and when exactly? — I was troubled by the vagueness of it all, and ashamed because I was too young to be told). I suffered, too, because I was not in a state of grace. I had sins on my soul: without Father Furty I could not confess.

But I could discern a logic in being a sinner and wanting to be a priest. In fact, it seemed to me that one went with the other. It wasn’t piety, but sin, that made someone want to enter the priesthood: it was the only possible purification. Your choice was either that cleansing by the sacrament of Holy Orders, or else you left your soul black and lost your faith. And either way it was a sacrifice — your body or your soul.