My Secret History (8 page)

“Is that one of them two-way radios?” Mrs. Bazzoli said.

“Nope. That’s a one-way radio.”

She said, “Are you sure?”

Father Furty made a face. “Questions, questions,” he said. He might have been joking or angry: it was impossible to tell. “ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Do you really mean it?’ Questions like that and incessant talk are a crime against humanity.”

Mrs. Bazzoli had tucked her head down—shortened her neck—not knowing whether Father Furty was attacking her, but also taking no chances.

“ ‘Why’ is a crime,” he said, and for emphasis he shook his jowls. “ ‘Why’ is a serious crime.”

Mrs. Bazzoli cleared her throat in an appreciative way, as Father Furty reached for the radio. He turned up the volume of a Peggy Lee song and began to sing with it. He always knew the words. Something about knowing songs made him seem to me very worldly and very lonely.

“You give me fever,” he sang.

Mrs. Bazzoli shook her head and returned to the stern section of the boat, where the women had asked me to set up folding chairs.

“Is this it?” Mrs. Skerry said. “Is this all?” And she looked around, widening her eyes and touching at her bristles. “I thought there was something else about boats.”

“There’s sinking,” Mrs. Cannastra said, and sipped from her Dixie cup. She smiled and said, “Bug juice.”

Mrs. Corrigan was knitting, Mrs. Palumbo pushed her face towards a tiny mirror and pressed lipstick onto her pouty mouth. Mrs. Hickey tried to control the
Herald
, but the pages lashed at her head. Mrs. DuCane sat smiling with her hands in her lap.

“I didn’t realize there were so many islands out here,” Mrs. Skerry said.

We had left the inner harbor and were plowing through the speckled, oil-smeared water—boats all around us, and islands on the left and right. Plump white-bellied planes were descending overhead, making for Logan Airport. Mrs. Corrigan could see the Customs House, Mrs. DePalma could see the John Hancock, Mrs. Hickey thought she could see the Old North Church.

“I can see two Faneuil Halls,” Mrs. Cannastra said.

“Are you sure that’s bug juice?” Mrs. Corrigan said.

Mrs. Cannastra grinned at her with purple-stained teeth.

“I’ll bet you’re starving,” Mrs. Bazzoli said to Tina.

Tina said no, she wasn’t.

“I would be if I were you.”

Mrs. Bazzoli must have weighed two hundred and eighty pounds.

“I’ve just been down with renal colic,” Mrs. Hickey was saying.

All this time, Father Furty quietly steered us to the outer harbor, and when we began to approach another island—Deer Island, he said—he asked me to kneel at the bow and make sure there were no rocks in the way.

“All clear so far,” I said.

At last we reached a ruined jetty and moored
Speedbird
to the still-standing posts.

“Let’s set up them card tables,” Mrs. Prezioso said.

They pushed three together on the afterdeck and covered them with a paper tablecloth, which was held in place with all the bowls of food.

“Shouldn’t we say a prayer?” Mrs. DuCane said, and looked triumphant as the others froze in the act of loading their plates.

Mrs. Cannastra had been saying to Father Furty, “Go ahead. It’s bug juice, Father.”

He held it but did not sip it. Instead he turned to Mrs. DuCane and said, “This is a form of prayer. Be happy. This is a way of praising God.”

“I hope you like onions!” Mrs. DePalma said, heaping a plate with salad. “This is for the Father.”

“I was doing one for him,” Mrs. Hogan said, with a note of objection in her voice.

Mrs. Bazzoli said, “I know he likes coleslaw. That’s why I got this one ready. Hey, it’s an Italian helping!”

They all still wore their big earrings, and their small hats were skewered to their piled-up hair, and some wore tight gloves—the kind they wore to church. They bumped arms at the tables—it seemed each woman was taking charge of Father Furty’s lunch by readying a plate for him, making a mound of food.

“I can’t eat all of that,” he said. “But it’s swell of you to think of me. Listen, this one will do me fine.”

He took Tina’s plate. She had not intended it for him, so there was very little on it—a Swedish meatball, a sesame seed roll, and a few spoonfuls of green salad.

“Eat,” he said, and pulled the roll into three hunks. And raising his paper cup he said, “Drink.”

He had dragged his captain’s chair to the end of the row of tables, and the women fitted themselves in, five on each side. They sat down and hunched forward, so their long slanting breasts lay supported by their upthrust bellies.

Tina and I sat on the rail—there wasn’t any spare room at the tables. In fact, the tables and the women filled the whole of the stern section of the boat. But though they were hemmed in, and the breeze made the tablecloth flap and tear against the women’s knees, it seemed much more formal than a picnic. It was more like a ritual—polite and pious.

“This is a real sit-down dinner,” Mrs. Prezioso said.

“Pass the pickles, Mrs. Pretz,” Mrs. Hogan said.

Father Furty said, “Let’s hope the Boss doesn’t find out.”

No one understood except me.

“That’s what we call the Pastor,” he said. “Sometimes we call him the Keeper.”

The secret words seemed scandalous to them, and they laughed hard, congratulating themselves that they had heard it from Father Furty himself.

“I think someone’s going to be a stool pigeon,” he said. He was grinning. “Who’s the fink?”

Mrs. DuCane said, “Certainly not me!”

But the others looked quickly at her and didn’t say anything, so the mere fact that Mrs. DuCane opened her mouth seemed to single her out as the guilty party.

Father Furty didn’t mind—he was still smiling. He took his paper cup in two hands and lifted it as if in praise. Then he swallowed in anticipation—holding the cup away from his face—and finally gulped some, and chewed a hunk of bread.

“I love to see you digging in,” he said. He really did seem to be enjoying himself, and yet he had only drunk the bug juice and had eaten practically nothing.

“Just feeding our faces,” Mrs. Skerry said. “Isn’t that a sin?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Father Furty said. “This is innocent pleasure. This is glorifying God. Hey, let’s have a smile, Hazel—God’s not your enemy!”

Hazel was Mrs. Corrigan’s name, but it was odd to hear it spoken in such a friendly way by a priest. Yet he didn’t look like a priest. He looked human—like a man, like a manager who had decided to turn the company banquet into a picnic.

“At least it’s not a sin,” Mrs. Bazzoli said, and moved a drumstick to her mouth. “I’m never sure about sin.”

“I’ve seen plenty of bad, but I’ve never seen evil,” Father Furty said. “Bad yes, evil no. And I’m from Jersey!”

“More bug juice?” Mrs. Cannastra said.

She leaned over to pour it out. Father Furty protested but he took it all the same. His face had begun to swell and grow pinker.

I could tell that Tina was shocked—the way non-Catholics reacted when they saw a priest acting human: eating and drinking and calling women by their first name. Yet I was grateful to him. By being human he made me feel pious—not holy but doing my duty, and maybe still in a state of grace.

“This is my last one,” Father Furty said. “But I want the rest of you to drink up and dig in!”

He winked at us but looked a little ill, and when he got to his feet he seemed unsteady.

“Let’s have a song,” he said.

“A hymn?” Mrs. Hickey said.

“A song,” Father Furty said, and began to sing.

He kept on, with the women joining in, then he sat down and smoked Fatimas and flipped the butts overboard.

“How’s Danny?”

“I’m up to Circle Eight. Thieves.”

“That’s swell,” he said and seemed genuinely pleased once more.

“They’re in a pit, all tied up,” I said, encouraged by his interest. “But instead of rope, it’s snakes twisted around them.”

“Oh?” And now he seemed surprised.

“There’s a man called Vanni Fucci in the pit. His sin was stealing a treasure from a sacristy—snakes all over him! He’s not even sorry. In fact, he—”

Father Furty was very interested, and I saw that I had gone too far to stop. He squinted at me to continue.

“This guy, um, gives God the finger,” I said, and to cover my embarrassment at having said this went on, “By the way, the bottom of Hell isn’t hot, Father. It’s all ice.”

He thought a moment, then turned to Mrs. Cannastra. “Hell on the rocks,” he said.

“Sounds like a drink,” she said.

“Sounds like all drinks.”

He was still smiling, and I thought: This is all I want for now. I was happy being with Tina, the sun crackling on us and the water lapping the boat with a bathtub sound. For once I felt I was doing the right thing, and enjoying it, too! I was also glad that none of these women were paying any attention to Tina or me. I had never loved her more. It was because we were here.

There were more songs. Mrs. Skerry sang “Galway Bay,” and Mrs. Bazzoli and Mrs. DePalma sang an Italian song that they said was about the sea, and I kept hearing the words
medzo mar
.

There were rumbles of thunder from the direction of Revere, and a black cloud enlarged like a stain over Nahant.

“We’d better start back,” Father Furty said, and then the sun was gone. He felt his way along the rail to the cabin, his shirt lifting and flapping.

Passing me, he squeezed my knee and said, “Bad yes, evil no,”
and winked at me. He had not squeezed me hard, but there was something in the pressure of his fingers that told me he was not well.

We thumped the jetty posts twice, and flaked off some of our paint, while I was untying my clove hitches—for some reason, Father Furty was gunning the engine. Then we started away, the boat shimmying a little. At the wheel, Father Furty was wearing a crooked grin—perhaps it was because of the Fatima in his mouth. He was singing along with the radio.

The women were clearing up the plates and folding the card tables.

It did not seem to me that Father Furty was really steering the boat. It was more as if he was holding tight to the wheel to keep himself from falling. He sagged on it, rather than keeping it in a light steerer’s grip with his fingertips, as he usually did. He looked wildly happy.

“Are you all right, Father?” I asked.

He said, “I’ll bet she’s a joy to be with.”

The harbor water began to smack and slop against us. The splashing over the rail I took to be a bad sign, and the girlish screams of the women made me anxious.

“What’s that?” Mrs. Palumbo asked.

“Probably Moon Island,” Father Furty said, and turned slowly—first his eyes, then his head—to watch it pass on the portside.

I said, “Careful of that tug.”

Accelerating, Father Furty said, “What tug?”

But it was too late.

There was no panic. Even as the side of
Speedbird
was being stoved in by the tug from
Blue Neptune Towing
, and the rails twisted off the decks, and the cleats sheared cleanly off by the shoulders of the tug—as all this was happening, the women of the Sodality shrieked and laughed, as they had when they’d been hit with spray that morning. They did not know it was a disaster—they may have thought it was part of all cruises, the really funny part. That was how much they trusted Father Furty.

Afterwards, the way people talked about it made it seem dramatic and dangerous—two boats crashing in the harbor, some near-drownings, heroism, chaos. But it was not that way at all. It was an embarrassing accident, we were towed into harbor by the very boat we had hit. It was humiliating, it was bruises and hurt feelings.

Then I saw that there is a neatness about tragedy—it looks perfect, as false things so often do: fake blood in all the right places, pretty victims, stately burials and then silence. It is all glorious and conceited. But nothing is worse than disgrace. It is lonely and irreversible—a terrible mess. The loud snorting laughter it produces is worse than anguish. Having to live through a disgrace is worse than dying.

All your secrets in a twisted form belong to everyone else—and you are in the dark. That was how I felt then, guessing at what was going on; and I didn’t know the half of it. Nothing truthful was revealed, but a version of events emerged. It was like a badly wrapped parcel coming apart—slowly at first, just stains producing rips and leaks, and then more quickly collapsing until it was all loose string and flaps and crumpled wrapping, and something dark and slimy showing through, and finally flopping onto the floor in full view, while people said, “Oh, God, what’s that?”

It began, as so many disasters did, when I heard my mother speaking on the phone.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”

No, she believed it all, and wanted more: this was her way of encouraging the person at the other end.

“That couldn’t be true,” she said.

She became more interested as she became disbelieving.

“Well, we all know that’s his cross,” she said. “He’ll just have to carry it.”

The last thing I heard as I hurried out of the door was her calling my name.

But I kept going—to the bus, to the Sandpits; with my Mossberg.
In that frame of mind, nothing was more consoling to me than the sound of beer bottles breaking on a crate as my bullets smashed into them.

I had thought that by managing to get ashore we would be safe. No one was hurt. Mrs. Bazzoli had a bruise above her knee that was like a faint smear of jam, and she kept raising her skirt with a kind of dreadful pride to show it. There were wet blouses thickened over bras. Mrs. Cannastra could not stop laughing. The leftovers had turned to garbage. Mrs. Palumbo proposed saying a prayer of thanksgiving that it had ended safely.

Father Furty did not join in on that prayer.

“We’re going to hear about this,” he said, yet he did not look sad.