My Secret History (7 page)

“God’s country,” Father Furty said.

“Ah, you reminded me!” Father Flynn said, and laughed and shook his finger in excitement. “The Boss received a postcard yesterday from his brother in Ireland—you’ll never guess the message!”

“Don’t tell me you read it,” Father Hanratty said, but he was more interested than angry.

“If you weren’t meant to read postcards they’d be in envelopes.”

Father Furty said, “You’re keeping us in suspense.”

“Postmark, Cork. Message, ‘Greetings from the land of faith.’ I swear it! Have you ever heard such a thing?”

Father Furty laughed, but gently—it was still early morning and he was not yet himself. He said, “That’s enough. You’ll confuse the boy.” He turned to me. “You won’t get any intellectual stimulation here, son. They’ve never read Danny. Father Flynn here reads the racing sheets, while Father Hanratty struggles with the
Boston Globe
. And of course they read the Boss’s postcards.”

“And what do you read, Billy?” Father Flynn said.

“Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Tables,” Father Furty said. “And I see that High Water in the harbor this Saturday is at the civilized hour of twelve noon. You’ll be coming along, won’t you, Andy?”

My mouth was full of toast, but I nodded eagerly yes.

We sat, and I listened to their banter, and I was the more excited for not understanding it, because I was so flattered to be included. I had the strong impression from their comedy, which was always a little forced and desperate, that they were outcasts, and that I was one of them. So at last I had a place at Saint Ray’s.

“Too bad you have to go,” Father Furty said, when I got up to head for the pond.

He sounded as if he meant it!

“Why not serve for me tomorrow?”

It was the only day I didn’t have a mass.

“I’ll add your name,” he said. “Listen, I’d appreciate it!”

That made it a full week of serving early masses, but I began to see a point in the routine. Instead of the masses being an interruption, the other hours in the day seemed an interruption; the masses were regular, dignified, austere and orderly on those cool bright summer mornings: the muffled church, the few people in the pews, the whispered prayers, the two tearlike droplets in the chalice; four masses, and then my second funeral.

We went to an afternoon movie, Tina and I, because I wanted to touch her. It was
All That Heaven Allows
, with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, and we held hands until they were so hot and sticky I was glad to let go. That year the girls wore several petticoats that filled their skirts, and Tina must have been wearing two or three because they crunched in the narrow movie-seat, I suppose it was the starch, and aroused me. I reached for her leg but her hand was there already and snatched mine away. I put my arm around her and kept it there until it went to sleep, and when I yanked it back, we knocked our heads together. The movie ended at five-thirty and we went out and were blinded by the sun on Salem Street. I had a headache, my feet were tingly from sitting. We bought ice-cream cones at Brigham’s, then I went home and had meatloaf. It was always meatloaf. I was glad that Tina had not let me touch her: there was nothing to confess except the impure thought. She had saved me.

“You’ve been smoking,” my mother said, putting her face against my hair and sniffing hard.

I denied it—it must have been the musty stink at the Square Theater.

“Where have you been?”

“After work I went to the library.”

Wasting a glorious day in God’s sunshine!
she would have said if I had been to a movie.
And where did you get the money?
If I had told her I had gone with a girl she would have squinted at me and said
Why?
And she would have kept asking why until I admitted that it was a waste of money, a waste of time, and very foolish—
And who is this girl?

I never dared to give the truthful answers to her questions. I lied and pretended I was telling her the truth. She glared at me like God and pretended she believed me. But she knew.

“I was looking up some information on Dante—and seeing if they had the other two books.”

Louie said, “I don’t believe you’re really reading that book.”

“Test me!” I said, and put the paperback on the table. The cover was cracked and peeling from being stuffed into my back pocket. It had the mangled look of having been read.

No one said anything—perhaps I had been too shrill. But after all my lies they had chosen to challenge me when I was actually telling the truth!

“It’s not fire at the bottom of Hell, you know,” I said, because out of curiosity—and fear—I had skipped ahead in order to know the worst. I had read the last three cantos. “It’s ice, it’s all ice—murderers are frozen in it. It’s not fire!”

They were a little impressed and a little apologetic, and I felt all the more guilty about having lied about the library.

My second funeral, Mr. Kenway’s, was eerie. I found myself thinking: One more and I get a wedding—and I warned myself not to think it.

“I didn’t know he was a Catholic,” my mother said. “He never went to mass.”

I took it that he might not have died in a state of grace. He had been old and alone. He had no family. The pallbearers were from Gaffey’s Funeral Home—I could tell by their gray gloves and black coats and pin-stripe trousers. They had brought the coffin and were waiting to take it away, to Oak Grove.

There were no tears, no sobs, the church was almost empty. I recognized the other people as those who went to most of the services—early mass, the Novenas, the Stations, and the funerals of people they didn’t know. Yet that day Saint Ray’s was sadder than if every pew had been filled with weeping, honking relatives.
Father Furty and I were the chief mourners, and were not mourning. When the coffin bumped over the threshold, the sound rang throughout the church, like a loud
ouch!
Then the pitiful clatter of the wheels, and the organ groaning into the emptiness.

Father Furty seemed frightened. He was very silent and trembling in his midmorning frailty; his shoes squeaked in a way I associated with timidity—most of his moods were revealed by the different squeaks of his shoes.

Once again I was the only altar boy. In the still church, with the solitary coffin, I went through the routine and noticed how Father Furty’s hands trembled. He was very unsteady and walked in a toppling way. When he came over for water and wine his chalice rattled against my cruet of wine. I was in the habit of only dispensing a drop, and though he seemed to be waiting for more—clank, clank—I mechanically resisted tipping the cruet. He got his two drops and went to the tabernacle, still trembling.

It was a hot day, but he was perspiring more than usual, and his white sleeves and his collar were limp and dark with dampness, his wet hair shone in prickly points on his forehead and his neck. (My own plastic collar was slippery with sweat and kept springing out of its button and clamping itself over my shoulder.)

Father Furty’s voice quavered when he spoke directly to the coffin in Latin. He incensed it, and holy-watered it, and blessed it; but still it had a sad unpolished look and I kept thinking that Mr. Kenway’s soul might be in Bolgia Five of the Inferno, among the Grafters and Demons.

The men from Gaffey’s got up and rolled the coffin down the aisle towards the blazing doorway, and then the church was empty and smelling sadly of vigil lights and flowers.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Father Furty said, when we were in the sacristy.

Was he talking to himself? He was removing his vestments, kissing each one and mumbling a prayer as he took it off and folded it. He did this slowly, in a resigned way, and I felt like a savage, yanking my surplice over my head and tearing open the snaps—so much easier than buttons—on my cassock.

“Are you going up to the pond?”

“Yes, Father. And I’m late.”

“In that case, I’ll give you a ride.”

“I’m not
that
late.”

He raised his hand. It was a characteristic gesture. It meant: No problem.

He played his car radio the whole way, and at the pond he insisted on buying me a hot dog and a root beer. He said the beach looked very nice, and bought himself another lemonade. I introduced him to the policeman and the lifeguard and the matron of the girls’ locker room, Mrs. Boushay. “That’s my Buick,” she told him. “I wish I’d never seen it.” He didn’t call himself Father Furty. He stuck out his hand and said, “Bill Furty.”

“You’ve got a nice crowd here,” he said to the policeman, and he talked to the lifeguard about Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he was about to be stationed.

I hoped that they would not bring up the subject of people getting polio at the pond, and they didn’t.

Father Furty stood in his civilian clothes and gazed across the murky pond, seeming not to notice the kids in their bathing suits—swimming, splashing, running, howling, hanging on the floats, throwing sand.

He said, “If I go in, will you watch me?”

I must have looked bewildered. I did not want to ask him why, but he sensed the question.

He said, “Because I can’t swim.”

He changed in the locker room—I gave him a locker—and he returned to the beach. He did not swim. He waded in and lay back and floated for a moment; and then he stood up and the water streamed down his body and his black trunks. It wasn’t swimming, and it wasn’t a dip. It was more like a baptism.

“A lot of fishermen don’t know how to swim. It’s deliberate. There’s less agony if their boat sinks. They just go down with it. That’s the way I’d want it.”

His eyes glittered as he spoke. He looked happy again, and a little healthier—it was past noon.

“Oh, I’m just wasting your time,” he said.

I laughed at the way he put it—wasting my time!

When he was gone, I told the lifeguard and the policeman he was a priest. They said, “Cut the crap, Andy.”

It made me admire Father Furty all the more to think they did not believe me.

Father Furty had a whiskery off-duty look, and his Hawaiian shirt flapping over his black priest’s trousers, and the way his loafers squeaked today, made him seem relaxed and thankful. A hot day in this part of Boston—we were just getting out of his Chevy on Atlantic Avenue—was made hotter by the soft tar bubbling around the cobblestones, the dazzle of car chrome in traffic, and the smell of red bricks and gasoline.
Speedbird
was tied up at Long Wharf, among the fishing boats and other cabin cruisers. The high sun was smacking and jangling the water.

My mother had said, “Who’ll be on the boat with you?”

I didn’t mention Tina. I had told her that I did not know, which was a good thing, because there were ten ladies from the Sodality, and if my mother had known she would have felt left out.

They wore dresses and blouses and hats and big blue clumping shoes, as they had before. Besides Mrs. DuCane, Mrs. Corrigan, Mrs. Prezioso, Mrs. DePalma and Mrs. Hogan, with the same picnic dishes they had brought on the last outing, there was Mrs. Palumbo with Swedish meatballs, Mrs. Bazzoli with a basin of coleslaw, Mrs. Skerry with a fruit basket and a loaf of Wonder bread, Mrs. Hickey with a homemade chocolate cake, and Mrs. Cannastra with two bottles of purple liquid that looked like Kool-Aid.

Mrs. DuCane asked what it was.

“Bug juice,” said Mrs. Cannastra.

“Poor Edda Palumbo,” Mrs. Hickey said. “God love her. She lost her husband to a tumor.”

“What’s your name, honey?” Mrs. Hogan said.

“Tina Spector.”

“You got a mother here?” Mrs. Hogan was confused.

Tina just shook her head and blushed.

“Give me a hand separating these cheese slices.” And Mrs. Hogan showed her bony teeth. “You like Velveeta, dear?”

Tina was recruited: she became one of the women, and because she was there I noticed how smooth and pink her skin was, and how the rest of the women were furry-faced, and had downy cheeks, and some had bristles.

I had not mentioned Tina to my mother. She knew Tina was a non-Catholic; she would have misunderstood and been suspicious, and after a while she would have resented it and blamed me and said, “There are so many Catholic girls.”

Never mind religion, I didn’t even think of Tina as a girl. She was a desperate feeling in me that made my heart gasp and my throat contract: I loved her.

Meanwhile, Father Furty was saying out loud that he hoped we would have a safe trip and good weather, and then he blessed himself and I realized that he had been praying.

“Cast off,” he said next, and directed me to untie the lines from the cleats on the dockside.

The Sodality ladies all shrieked and laughed as we started away, like small girls. Tina was not among them; she stood in the shadow of the cabin, looking old and sick with worry.

“What if my mother finds out?” she had said before we boarded. “What if the Father asks me if I’m a Catholic?”

“We’ll ad-lib,” I said.

It was a Furty expression.

I was very happy. That was so rare. I had known contentment but until then not this kind of happiness. And what was rarer—I knew I was happy.

I had been raised to believe that I was bad, that most of what I did was bad, that the things I wanted were bad for me. It was not an accusation—no one barked about my badness. It was rather an interminable whisper of suggestion that I was weak and sinful, and the sense that I was always wrong. And it seemed I could never win. It was
Hurry up!
and then
Don’t run!
It was
Eat!
and then
Don’t eat so fast!
It was
Speak up!
and then
Don’t shout!

What have you been doing?
could only be answered truthfully in one way:
Being bad
. There was something natural and unavoidable about being bad. Being hungry was bad, going to the movies
was bad, sitting and doing nothing was bad, being happy was bad; and bad turned easily into evil.

On Father Furty’s
Speedbird
I had the unusual feeling that I was not doing something bad, and that to me was pure joy. It was Father Furty’s influence, the way he smiled at Tina and welcomed us on board. He had a graceful way of implying that we were helping him: we were doing him a favor by being with him, and he was depending on us rather than the other way around. But I was also happy because Father Furty knew me. I had confessed to him, and though of course he would never break the seal of the confessional, he had seen my heart, and it was not the messy and sometimes imaginary bad that I was nagged about at home. No, he knew my sins and had absolved them, so it was Father Furty who was responsible for my being in a state of grace.