Paul Theroux - My Secret History

He said, “I could feel it.”

I was staring at him, holding the skirt of my cassock.

He said, “When a girl gets hot her hole gets bigger.”

I could picture this very distinctly, the dark opening and the way it widened in a round welcoming way. My mouth was very dry. No one had ever said those words to me before, but it made perfect sense.

Chicky was fixing his plastic collar — twisting it to fasten the collar button into it.

“She was really hot,” he said. “I got three fingers into her.”

The sun was streaming through the stained-glass window over the vestments, and the alb and the white linens blazed. The sacristy was warm and smelled of floor polish and soft candlewax.

“Who was it?”

Now I had my cassock and surplice on, and I was tying the black bow in front of my collar. It was impossible for me to hide my fascination with what he had told me.

He grinned to tease me with another delay, and then he said, “Magoo.”

It was a girl named Eloise McGonagle, but no one called her anything but Magoo.

Chicky was still grinning, but now his lips were purple. He held out a bottle of mass wine and said in a man-of-the-world way, “Want a swig?”

I tried not to look shocked. It was not that he was drinking mass wine — I had seen him do that before, and had even had some myself — but rather that he was doing it so near to the time the priest was to arrive. His tongue was purple, he had a purple mustache. He sloshed the wine in the bottle and said, “Go ahead.” His face was Italian yellow, he had long eyelashes and a birthmark like a bruise on his cheek. When he smiled he looked like a monkey.

I took a swig. It tasted harsh and bitter — it tasted dreadful. I had another. It tasted even worse.

“Have one of these,” Chicky said.

He was holding out a handful of communion wafers, small papery disks, and some spilled to the floor as he offered them.

“They’re not consecrated, so what the fuck,” he said recklessly and stuffed the hosts into his mouth.

Just then the priest came in, walking fast.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” the priest said, blessing himself as he strode from the sacristy door to the sideboard where the vestments were neatly folded, and there he genuflected.

“Let us pray,” he said, and paused, before he added, “for the conversion of Russia.”

His face seemed to swell up when he closed his eyes to pray. He murmured — the little whimpers that suggested that the prayers were for a lost cause — and Chicky gulped down the last of the hosts and made a face that said, “Who’s this dink?” which was a remark he often made.

“Amen,” the priest said, and began the slow business of putting on his vestments, murmuring more prayers and kissing each garment before wrapping it around himself.

I had never seen him before, and I knew at once he was unlike any of the other priests at St. Ray’s. The Pastor was white-haired and tall and had a stern chalky forehead and small pitiless eyes and pale lips; and the other priests — Father Skerrit, Father Hanratty, and Father Flynn — were young, thin, and Irish. They had knobby joints and large Adam’s apples and the popping eyes that usually go with them, and blush blotches on their cheeks. They smelled of clean laundry and talcum powder; the Pastor had no smell at all.

But Father Furty (I saw his name in the Mass List on the sacristy wall) was a big man — thick arms and an overhanging belly — and although not old he had grayish hair cut very short in a sort of Julius Caesar style. He was bottle-nosed and had a meaty face and sausagey fingers. I could tell he was strong — the way he filled his vestments, the way his loafers squeaked. That was another thing: I had never seen a priest wear anything as sporty as loafers — and to a funeral!

He seemed unusual, but I could not figure out what it was about him that made him different. Then I realized what it was: he was human. He looked like a normal man. He was a man in a priest’s clothes. I had never thought of priests as men before — and I had certainly never thought of nuns as women.

He smiled at me and said, “Yoomit.” He took a hanky out of his sleeve and wiped the perspiration from his face.

It was a moment before I knew he meant humid.

He said, “You guys better light some charcoal. This is a requiem mass.”

He said “guys” and “requiem” in the same way, out of the side of his mouth. For some reason I felt he had been in the navy — he certainly looked more like a sailor than a priest, and perhaps for that reason I found him a reassuring priest.

Chicky and I brought the thurible onto the lawn outside the sacristy and put a match to the charcoal disk. The cross on it fizzed and then we took turns swinging it around until the disk was fiercely alight.

This, like ringing the bells, was another enjoyable routine of being an altar boy. During the mass the priest would sprinkle incense onto the glowing charcoal and a powerful and pungent odor would be released in billows.

I had never questioned being an altar boy. It was something that was expected and inevitable when a boy turned eleven. It was part of being a Catholic boy — an honor and a duty. And becoming a priest was also a possibility. “You might have a vocation,” my mother used to say. I hoped I did not have a vocation; I did not believe I had a choice. When my mother said, “God might choose you for Holy Orders,” I imagined something like marching orders — a beckoning finger, a stern summons — and off I’d go to be a priest, whether I liked it or not. But so far I had heard nothing.

“I’ve never seen this priest before.”

“Furty,” Chicky said. “He’s an alkie.”

“Bullshit.”

“He’s a boozehound. I can prove it.”

It was a beautiful July day, with a bright sky and a loud drone of bees on the flower beds and the clack of lawnmowers across the Fellsway. We knelt in the shade, playing with the smoking thurible, which looked more than ever like a lantern, and then we went in to the funeral.

The routine of a funeral meant waiting until the casket was wheeled into position in the center aisle, and the pews were filled. We could see this from where we now stood, two altar boys in front, priest holding a monstrance like a gold mirror against his chest.

“Let’s go,” Father Furty said, and Chicky yanked the chain to warn the congregation we were coming, and we could hear them clattering to their feet as soon as the bell sounded.

The rich aroma of flowers I always associated with death, and the incense and the beeswax candles always meant a solemn high mass and a long service. It seemed the more odors there were the longer it would all take. At this funeral there were snuffles and sobs, and one person weeping very loudly.

I was fifteen. I had never known anyone who had died: the emotion of grief was disquieting to me, but alien; yet it was no more disturbing to me than hearing someone laugh and not knowing the reason. My first funeral had bewildered me — not the idea of the body in the casket but the crying, the intensity of it — I had never heard anyone crying like that, so sad and continuous. It was always loud and pitiful, but it also seemed to me insincere, because the person was dead. But I had never known anyone who had died.

When we walked down from the altar to the center aisle and the casket, passing the hot rack of burning vigil lights, Chicky motioned for me to look at him. He was carrying the long-handled cross. He had a very ugly, rubbery, funny face — and the candlelight made it yellower. He often tried to get me laughing, especially at funerals. I faced him, to show him that I could take it without laughing. He wrapped three fingers around the shaft of the cross and shaped the word “Magoo” with his lips.