by Paul Theroux
I had never believed that such a priest was possible, and so until I had met him I had never imagined being a priest. He was better than me, but he resembled me. I had thought that I was sadder and more tormented, and that my life was more difficult than his. But he made me believe in myself as a priest; by making happiness look natural and right. I had always thought happiness was a venial sin—that it was selfish. Now when I imagined the priesthood I saw myself with a wiffle and a flowered Hawaiian shirt and black slacks and sandals, smoking Fatimas and singing along with the radio in the car.
All this was news to me, and it helped, but remembering that he was dead still made me feel sick—sick, rather than hopeless.
Chicky DePalma was in the sacristy that day talking to Walter Hogan.
He said, “I’m bombing up Brookview to the church, thinking I’m going to be late—and who do I see in a tight sweater, with knobs like this? Yeah! Hey, Parent, are you listening?”
“No,” I said.
“And a tight skirt, and I think, mingya!”
“Cut it out,” I said.
“Parent walks around with a boner all day.”
Chicky had thick lips and spaces between his teeth and hooded eyes and a heavy Sicilian jaw. Whenever he said something obscene he made his monkey mouth.
“So what do you think of Tina the Wiener coming to church with her knobs—”
I heaved myself at him and pushed him against the lockers, banging his head and yanking his cassock. “If you say one more word I’ll kick the living shit out of you!”
My threats didn’t matter, but he had hit his head very hard, and I had torn three or four buttons off of his cassock. He was startled, and hurt, and he saw that I was very angry.
“He’s apeshit,” Walter Hogan said softly.
That was a form of praise. But my reaction had startled me too and taken all my anger away. I also felt righteous—my swearing didn’t matter: I was on the side of sanctity, insisting on reverence and fighting for it. That calmed me down.
Meanwhile, another altar boy—Vito Bazzoli—had walked in. Walter whispered to him, but they said nothing directly to me. I think they were afraid of me—or respected me—at last, and I was glad.
The mass was said by the Pastor, and as it was a requiem he was assisted by Father Skerrit. Requiems always seemed to me like plays—dramas with two characters. The Pastor had the main part, and Father Skerrit had a subsidiary role, scurrying around and responding in a nervous voice to the Pastor’s pompous lines. We altar boys were on the sidelines, a thurifer, and four acolytes, and Chicky with the seven-foot crucifix.
“It’s going to be a closed coffin,” my mother had said of the wake.
There was a meaning in her voice that I did not understand. I had never thought about it before—a coffin closed or open. The dead looked so lumpy and absent with the life drained out of them. But I was sorry I could not see Father Furty again, and I kept imagining his face against the lid of the coffin.
Standing beside it with my candle I felt weak again and I knew I was conspicuously pale and trembly. This suffering was not wholly due to the fact that Father Furty was dead (but how had he died? and when exactly?—I was troubled by the vagueness of it all, and ashamed because I was too young to be told). I suffered, too, because I was not in a state of grace. I had sins on my soul: without Father Furty I could not confess.
But I could discern a logic in being a sinner and wanting to be a priest. In fact, it seemed to me that one went with the other. It wasn’t piety, but sin, that made someone want to enter the priesthood: it was the only possible purification. Your choice was either that cleansing by the sacrament of Holy Orders, or else you left your soul black and lost your faith. And either way it was a sacrifice—your body or your soul.
The church was more than half-full. I had never seen so many people at a funeral; I had never recognized so many. No one was crying—that was strange; but I heard faint screws of sound, a kind of mewing and soft coughing that was almost as sad as silence.
As we circled the casket—priests and acolytes, Chicky and the thurifer, Father Skerrit with the holy water bucket, the Pastor with the sprinkler—I glanced towards the back of the church and saw Tina sitting by herself. She was sitting, I guessed, because she was not used to kneeling. She wore a blue sweater, and a white handkerchief was pinned to the top of her head. Now I was glad I had banged Chicky’s head in the sacristy.
We went back for the consecration—Father Skerrit did the bells—and then the Pastor waved us to the side pews and walked slowly—still playing his pious role—to the pulpit for his sermon.
In that moment of silence—no litany, no music—I heard some nose-blowing and some sobbing. I was certain they were the women Father Furty had taken out on his boat. Although they had seemed very plain and matronly on the boat, at the funeral, dressed in black, with veils and white faces, they looked almost beautiful to me, the way Father Feeney’s nuns had seemed. Their crying was not loud, there were no shrieks; it was all a soft agony of mourning, and in its muffled way it seemed to me the worst grief.
The Pastor hooked his hands onto the front of the pulpit and hung on and leaned back, staring hard at the congregation. His severe eyes seemed to still the sobbing. Then it struck me that I had modeled God on the Pastor—God’s glare, and God’s scowling face, and even his paleness and his white upswept hair; and both God and the Pastor had narrow Irish mouths that they held slightly open to show doubt or scorn or self-importance.
His silence silenced the congregation, but I knew it was a gimmick. As an altar boy, I had seen all the priests giving sermons—from Father Flynn, who trembled and forgot what he had just said, to the Pastor, who glared like God. Father Furty always opened with a little joke, and he often based his sermons on common expressions, like “throwing the bull” or “down in the dumps.”
The Pastor began today with a sudden shout and I could see people jump and straighten up, and a man in the first pew snapped his hymnbook shut. Usually, during sermons, people read the miracles in the back pages of the Novena book, to kill time. My ironing board caught fire … My son fell out the window … On a recent trip to New York City … Riding my bike on a busy street … My riveting machine exploded throwing heavy chunks of metal in every direction. I could easily have lost an eye or even my life. Miraculously, I was not hurt—not even a scratch. I owe this to the intercession of the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary. I had attended the Novena for nine Mondays in a row and asked especially for protection at work …
No one was reading the miracles now.
“We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves,” the Pastor said in a quoting voice—a sort of halting falsetto. “For even Christ pleased not himself. But, as it is written, the reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me.”
He let this sink in. “Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” he said, and then, “What does ‘strong’ mean? It means strong in faith.” And what did weak mean? It meant weak in body and soul. And what did infirmities mean? Infirmities meant giving in to occasions of sin. And what did we mean by “written”? And why did we say reproaches?
I remembered Father Furty saying, “Questions, questions! ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Do you really mean it?’ Questions like that are a crime against humanity … ‘Why’ is a crime …”
“And not to please ourselves!” the Pastor declaimed.
He repeated this, and defined simple words and made them so complicated they were hard for me to understand, and he went on asking why. The people listened intently because the Pastor’s voice—it was another of his sermon gimmicks—was loud and then soft: shouts and whispers to keep their attention.
I listened. I had never really listened to a sermon before, but when had a sermon ever mattered so much?
He seemed to be saying that Father Furty was weak and that he, the Pastor, was strong. And we were strong, too! It was our duty to pray for the weak, to help save their
souls. It was what Christ did—gave himself to other people and propped them up and helped them enter Heaven. He had done more than that—he had died for the sins of the world. Christ took that burden upon himself, and therefore we should follow his example and take this burden upon ourselves—Father Furty! In so many words, that was it.
“And not to please ourselves!” he kept saying. And this refrain meant it wasn’t pleasure—no fun, no enjoyment, not even any conscious satisfaction. It was suffering. He said: Pray. He said: Forgive. He said: Do penance.
And all this because Father Furty was a sinner. The Pastor didn’t use that word—he said “weak” and “almost lost” and “struggling”—but it was clear that he meant that Father Furty was a sad case. Because the poor man had needed help when he was alive (what help? That small dark room in Holy Name House?), now that he was dead the help had to continue, for alive or dead the weak were still weak and needed prayer.
Every time he said dead I died.
The idea was that Father Furty was in Purgatory, but we had to do the work to get him out.
I saw from this sermon how much the Pastor disliked him, and how he had turned poor Father Furty into a test of faith. But none of this really bothered him, for the emotion that was clearest in what he said was relief. Father Furty had been a problem as a live and lively man, but now that he was a soul in Purgatory—and not in Heaven or Hell—he was less of a problem.
Father Furty’s sermons were so different. “He went to the dogs,” he used to say. “Let me tell you what happens when you go to the dogs. Think of it—the dogs!”
I laughed when he said that, thinking of a pair of cocker spaniels my uncle owned. Father Furty laughed too. It was a good sermon. The message was: Don’t give up—Keep the faith—You’re not as bad as you think you are!
“On your knees,” the Pastor was saying. There was a sort of terror, like a black flame, hovering over the congregation. Father Furty had been a problem. He was better off dead—death in fact had come just in time. He was lucky to be dead, because he had been a failure, and now it was up to us to get him out of Purgatory and into the sight of God.
It was awful, it was horrible, I wanted to cry; but if I had the Pastor would have bawled me out from the pulpit.
There was a little more about penance, and then as suddenly as he had begun, the Pastor blessed himself—“And the Father, and the Son, and …”—and the sermon was over.
Eetay mee-sigh est.
Dayo grah-see-ahs.
I picked up my candlestick and as we filed slowly in front of the altar, and as the casket was rolled away, I realized that my mind was made up: I wanted to be a priest. It must have been God’s will, for how else could the thought have been planted there? I was glad that Tina had been at the funeral, because now it would be easier to explain my decision.
“Hey, Parent,” Chicky said in the sacristy.
His voice was gentle and friendly: it was his way of showing there were no hard feelings.
“Hey, that’s your third funeral.”
I had not thought of it as a funeral. It had been something much gloomier, more intense and final and private than anything I had ever known. I gave Chicky a blank look. I had lost my voice.
“Hey, you got a wedding coming to you.”
9.
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 kn
ow.”
“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.
