Paul Theroux: My Secret History

The porch of Holy Name House was screened-in and breezy but the interior of the house was very hot. The shades had been pulled down to cut the glaring sun, but the shadows looked just as hot as the bright patches. The day darkness of the house made it seem like a hospital ward, smelling of rubber tiles and clean paint and decaying flowers.

“This is where I’m staying,” Father Furty said in an announcing way that I was sure he meant as a joke. “I can’t exactly say I live here. Pretty spartan, eh?”

It was different from his mass voice, the one that had intoned the Pater Noster, and I liked it much better.

He had begun to slow down, though he was still leaning hard on my shoulder. And moving more carefully, he looked into each room as he passed it, poking the door open with his free hand and putting his head in.

“I guess we’re going to be all right.”

The house was empty, and the bright light of the summer day outside glaring through cracks in the Venetian blinds only made it seem stranger and more deserted. I was not at all afraid to be alone here with him; I was actually glad that he had chosen me to help him home — I had never been here! And I was so absorbed in this task that I had forgotten my anxiety about meeting Tina and picking up my Mossberg.

Father Furty groaned.

“I could call a doctor,” I said.

“What do doctors know about flat feet?” he said, staggering a little more.

We turned a corner. There was a mop stuck in a bucket in the middle of the corridor.

“Someone left that there for me to trip over,” Father Furty said and halted and swayed sideways.

I moved the mop and the bucket, and Father Furty continued. When he came to the last room on the right he caught hold of the doorway and hung on to it and panted, as if he had reached the end of a long struggle and was too exhausted to feel victorious.

Just then the doorbell rang.

“Let Betty get it. That’s Mrs. Flaherty. The housekeeper. Oh, bless us and save us.” He was still panting.

The bell rang again, the same two tones, stupid and insistent. I left Father Furty hanging on the door to his room and went to answer it.

A big distorted silhouette, head and shoulders, showed in the frosted glass of the front door. It was the Pastor. He scowled at me horribly when I opened the door, then he unstuck his lips and lowered his head and leaned towards me.

“What are you doing here?”

His sharp question made me uneasy and defensive; I felt instantly guilty, and uncertain of the truth. I did not know why I was here.

“Mopping the floor,” I said, because I could prove it, and I was not sure I could prove anything else. “Alone?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so.”

He always repeated what you said when he wanted to be sarcastic, and it never failed: every time he repeated something I had said it sounded stupid, and it gave me another reason for thinking I was dumb and that nothing good would ever happen to me in my life.

He repeated it again, making it stupider. I tried not to blink. Then I remembered my Mossberg in the sacristy, and I felt much worse and almost confessed to it.

“I’m looking for Father Furty,” the Pastor said. “Have you seen him?”

The last time I had seen Father Furty he had been hanging on the door to his small room and panting, “Oh, bless us and save us.” He wasn’t well, he needed protection; I knew the Pastor to be very fierce.

But instead of saying no, I shook my head from side to side. I held to the innocent belief that it was less of a lie if you did not actually say the word.

I hesitated, waiting for the thunderbolt to strike me down in a heap at the Pastor’s feet — and he would howl, “Liar!”

“Don’t just stand there,” he said. “The floor will never get mopped that way.”

I looked at the scarred rubber tiles.

“Mop it for the glory of God,” he said. “Dedicate that floor to Christ.”

When he said that, the floor looked slightly different, less filthy, and it even felt different — more solid under my feet.

The Pastor did not say anything more. He turned and left, and I realized as he went down the path that I was terrified: the thunderbolt had just missed me.

“Who was it?” Father Furty said, not sounding very interested. He was sitting heavily in his chair beside the bed, his arms on the arms of the chair, and his hands hanging.

“The Pastor.”

His hands closed and he sat up. “Where is he?”

“He went away. I told him you weren’t here.”

He settled into the chair again and smiled.

“That was a close one,” he said. “But why did you fib?”

“I thought you wanted me to,” I said, though I was very glad he had used the word “fib” and not “lie.”

“I thought you were sick.”

“It’s not fatal,” he said. “What’s your name, son?”

“Andrew Parent.”

“Shut the door when you leave, Andy,” he said. “God be with you.”

Then he made a little sound, like a hiccup or a sob. I left him in the hot shadows of his small room.

Tina was walking away from the bus stop as I crossed the Fells-way and when I yelled at her to come back people turned around.

“Kid’s got a gun,” someone in front of the drugstore said.

Tina said, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for over an hour.”

She wore a blue jersey and white shorts and sneakers and had two pony tails, one sticking out on each side of her head. Her lipstick was pink, the same shade as her small fingernails, and she fooled with a plastic bracelet, twisting it, as she looked at me.

“They’re never going to let you on the bus with that thing. You could kill somebody.”

But when the bus came, all the driver said was, “Take the bolt out of your rifle.”

“It’s out,” I said, and showed it to him.

We sat in the rear seat, listening to the shudder of the tin flap on the back of the bus. We did not talk. Tina went on twisting her bracelet. Near Spot Pond we passed the New England Memorial Hospital.

“They’re all Seventh-Day Adventists,” I said, trying to make conversation. “They don’t smoke or drink coffee. They’re not allowed to dance. They can’t eat meat. Hey, they can’t even eat tunafish!”

Tina did not say anything. I became fearful.

“Hey, are you a Seventh-Day Adventist?”

She shook her head — she did not say the word “no,” and so I wondered if she was lying. As far as I knew, she never went to any church, and I had no idea of her religion. I guessed that her mother was a protestant because she wasn’t a Catholic. Not having a recognizable religion added to Tina’s sexual attraction.

Beyond the hospital was a large gray building, like a courthouse with magnificent windows — the waterworks, on Spot Pond; and then the woods closed in. We passed the zoo and went another mile on a road that had become flatter and narrower.

“They don’t have sidewalks here,” Tina said.

We were the last passengers on the bus. We got off at Whipple Avenue and walked down a dirt road, through some dusty pine-woods.

The sky had gone pale gray in the heat, and there was a sea gull overhead, very high and drifting slowly.

“I once saw a guy shooting at a sea gull with a thirty-thirty.”

Tina squinted at me as if to say, “So what?”

“It’s against the law to kill sea gulls,” I said. “Because they eat garbage.”

A dog tumbled from behind a boulder and barked at us in a stupid desperate way.

“You can protect me,” Tina said.

“I’d never shoot a dog,” I said. “I wouldn’t even shoot a squirrel.”

“What have you got a gun for, then?”

“To break bottles,” I said.

We walked through the woods and entered the Sandpits. Part of it was a miniature desert — flat scrubby ground and dunes and cut-out slopes of sand. The quarry was the best place for target shooting; there the ledges were high and the sides funnel-shaped and cliffy, like Hell in Dante’s Inferno —I had recently bought the paperback and found it unexpectedly pleasant to read — and full of stinks and sights. The Sandpits had the same angles as Dante’s Hell, the same series of rocky shelves and long pits. But it was all empty, as if awaiting sinners.