Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Hey, you got a wedding coming to you.”

It was too painful after that to pray for Father Furty, because as soon as my prayer produced his friendly face my memory told me he was dead, and I missed him more than ever. I thought hard about becoming a priest. Did God want me? And I thought about Tina. I wanted to be the sort of priest who would have a friend like Tina, and it seemed a good life — being a priest, with close friends. Father Furty had been human in that way, and his example gave me hope.

There were my sins. I was still not in a state of grace, for whenever I thought of Tina — whenever she shimmered into my mind — I undressed her. Not all the way, but to her satiny slip, with little straps, and lace at the bottom edge, and the light showing through it and outlining the contours of her panties, the way she was packed into them. She always stood up in my imagining, with her arms at her sides, and slightly smiling, like a model in a Sear’s catalogue. This vision made the blood in my head pound, yet I knew it was wrong, it was Circle Two, and I had to hurry out and run, or break bottles, to get rid of it. But of course it was too late: it was just another terrible sin overlapping the others stuck on my soul like black patches.

Not seeing her made everything worse. I wanted to see her, but her mother and mine had come to some agreement to prevent our meeting. And of course, wanting to see her was not the same as having the willpower to see her, and I often thought I would be content just to go on imagining her in her underwear.

Then, two days after the funeral, the telephone rang.

“It’s me,” she said.

“Hi.” I was afraid to say her name.

“I saw you at the church.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How come you went?”

“Because I liked him, and I wanted to say goodbye. That sounds stupid. I mean, I didn’t want to stay away.”

“How did you know when to stand up or kneel down?”

“I just guessed.”

“Did you pray?”

“Sort of,” she said. “I saw you carrying that candle. Was it heavy?”

“Not really.”

“You looked cute in that altar boy outfit.”

I did not know what to say. I let a moment pass, but she spoke quickly and filled that silence with her whisper.

“Andy, my mother just went out to a sale at Filene’s and I’m all alone in the house, so why don’t you come over?”

The hammering began in my head, my mouth went dry. I said, “I don’t know.” I could sense her lips against the phone.

“We could listen to records,” she said.

“I’m pretty busy,” I said — a terror was taking hold of me. It was not dragging me away — it was thrusting me nearer to the danger of saying yes. Tina’s warmth came through the phone like heat through a pipe. “Let’s see, what time is it?”

From the next room, my mother said, “It’s half-past one.”

She had been listening!

“I just remembered something,” I said.

“Who’s that?” my mother called out. “Who are you talking to?”

“I’ve got to go,” I said, and hung up.

“Who was that?” my mother said. She was ironing in the kitchen, a laundry basket on the floor, a stack of neatly ironed clothes on the kitchen table. She was shaking water out of a tonic bottle fitted with a nozzle, and sending up hissing steam by pushing her iron over it. She always looked older and tireder when she was at the ironing board. Your shirts , she sometimes said in an accusing way, making me responsible for having to do this work. “Tell me.”

“No one.”

“I think you enjoy tormenting me,” she said. “Was it a girl?”

“No,” I said, because I was afraid of the questions that would follow my saying yes.

And yet they followed all the same.

“Andy, do you have a girlfriend?”

I shook my head: it seemed to make the lie less vicious.

“Is it that Tina Spector — the girl you promised me you wouldn’t see?”

When had I promised that? My denying grunt was “Uh-uh.” Again, a grunt seemed milder than an outright lie.

But my mother persisted, demanding the lie. “Are you sure?”

“No!” I said, and was surprised that I was not struck to the floor by a thunderbolt.

“What do you want a girlfriend for?” my mother went on, assuming that I had lied, and that I had meant yes.

“I don’t have a girlfriend!”

“Do you really mean that?” she said, knowing that I didn’t. “You’ve got a bike, and you were making that boat with Walter Hogan. And you’ve got a gun — though I hate guns. But you’ve got plenty to keep you busy without spending your time with some dizzy girl.”

“I know, I know.”

“You could get into a lot of hot water. Some of these girls—”

I didn’t say anything. I knew my voice would incriminate me. I looked down at my toes and waited, wondering if a storm would break over my head: sometimes she screamed at me, sometimes she cried.

She said in a piercing voice, “Are you telling me the truth?”

“If you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you something,” I said, in a desperate effort to head her off. “But it really is a secret.”

Her nostrils moved: she was taking a long snort of air, perhaps wondering what was coming. She knew I never told her secrets; she knew I never told her anything.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” I said.

“Of course I wouldn’t tell anyone,” she said, both interested and insulted. And then in her impatience to know she became stern. “What is it?”

“I think I want to be a priest,” I said. “I have a feeling that God wants me.”

She smiled and put down her iron and beckoned me to the ironing board. She hugged me, she said, “Andy,” and that was the end of her girlfriend questions.

But at that age I belonged to no one, and then to everyone, because I didn’t matter. There was no such thing as my privacy. If someone didn’t spy on me it wasn’t out of respect, but because they thought I had no secrets. And that was probably why I always thought of the future with foreboding, because I knew I was nowhere, and that I would have to start from the beginning, and that I would have to prove everything, and that I would never forgive anyone for making it so hard for me. “The Pastor wants to talk to you.”

My heart sank. I said, “What about?”

She said she didn’t know, and I couldn’t ask whether she had told him about my wanting to be a priest, because of course she had, and she would have hated me for making her deny it.

He was seated at a dark desk in a hot room in the rectory, and I thought how miserable it was to have to be inside shuffling papers on such a lovely day. It was bad enough having to wear socks and shoes! I associated hot airless rooms and dusty carpets with the tyranny of old unhappy men.

“Sit down,” the Pastor said, and just the tone of these two words told me I was in for it.

There were no papers on his desk, nothing in the room but a skinny Christ writhing on a wooden cross on one wall, and a vigil light in a red glass cup under an oval picture of the Virgin Mary. The Pastor was staring hard at me, and he put his fingertips together and worked his big clean hands apart and studied me with his mouth gaping like a fish.

“Where is your book?”

“Dante’s Inferno? I finished reading it, Father.”

“What are you reading now?”

“Campcraft , by Horace Kephart.”

He squinted at me. “Did you say Campcraft?”

“Yes, Father.” He looked displeased. I said, “And also He Went With Marco Polo.”

I did not want to tell him that I had borrowed more Dantes from the library and that I had found Purgatory dull and Paradise unreadable. I had liked the noise and motion of the Inferno , and I could easily imagine the funnel full of people. It was not just the blood and gore — and the reptiles and the ice — but that the people in Hell seemed real; the ones in Purgatory and Paradise were wordy and unbelievable. The Inferno was like life, and some of it seemed familiar. Father Furty had laughed out loud when I told him that the Inferno was full of Italians, like Boston. The words “shit” and “vomit” did not thrill me anymore; secretly I held on to six lines that Ulysses spoke to Dante,