My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  “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.

  I had sometimes seen sand trucks here, but there were none today. It was very hot. I could see small dusty birds and all around us was the screech of grasshoppers. Being there alone with Tina aroused me, and made me nervous, and gave me the idea of feeling her up—squeezing her breasts. The most I had ever done was kiss her, in the dark, at a party.

  I arranged a row of beer bottles on a log and told Tina to stand behind me, and started to shoot.

  At the first shot, Tina said, “Hey! My eardrums!”

  She was startled and afraid. That gave me confidence. I kept firing and emptied the chamber, then filled the tube again.

  “Your turn.”

  “I’m not touching that thing!”

  “You’re afraid,” I said.

  She said, “My mother would kill me if she knew.”

  There was something about the way she said it that made me want to impress her; and her fear steadied me, because I knew there was nothing dangerous about my Mossberg as long as you followed the rules. I broke six bottles apart—six shots—and then went back to where Tina was squatting under a sandy cliff.

  “So you’re afraid,” I said.

  Her elbows were pressed to her sides, and her face was squeezed between her hands. I sat beside her, holding the Mossberg.

  “Huh? Afraid?” I pretended to adjust something on the gun and pushed closer to her.

  She took a ball of Kleenex out of her sleeve and pinched it over her nose, and blew and twisted. The end of her nose was red.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  I stood up and raised the Mossberg and fired three shots. Bits of the broken bottles were flung aside with puffs of dust.

  Tina blew her nose again.

  I put the gun down. I did not know what to say. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to know what she was thinking, and I wanted it to be: Kiss me, touch me, do anything you like.

  She said, “I’m going to have to wash my hair when I get back home.”

  While she was saying this I put my arms around her. She closed her eyes and let me kiss her, and she kept her eyes closed, so I kissed her again. Her lips softened and still she did not open her eyes. That encouraged me; it was as if by keeping her eyes shut she was being obedient.

  Kissing her harder and closing my eyes I moved my hand onto the stiff cone of her breast, feeling the seams on her bra and rows and rows of stitches.

  “Don’t,” she murmured into my lips.

  When I tried it again she snatched my hand away hard and said, “Quit it!” That was tormenting: kissing her soft lips and at the same time feeling her quick fingers snagging my hand. Finally, I stopped kissing her, and then she opened her eyes.

  “If I don’t get home pretty soon my mother’s going to yell at me.”

  But I felt frustrated, so I delayed by shooting the remainder of my cartridges, finishing the box of fifty, while she pouted into the mirror in her wallet and put on more pink lipstick.

  On the bus she said, “Hey, what was the funeral like? Don’t tell me!”

  I thought a moment. She was teasing. But the funeral and its aftermath was very vivid to me, and it seemed to have a meaning I did not yet understand.

  “The priest got sick.”

  “Oh, they’re always getting sick,” she said.

  We did not speak about the kissing or my trying to feel her up. But we had never talked about it. The other time I had kissed her she had been worried about her history project—The Louisiana Purchase. Kissing was unmentionable; it was something we did with our eyes shut. If she had said something I would have been embarrassed. As it was, saying nothing, I felt older and experienced.

  As for the other thing—touching her breast—I was relieved now that she hadn’t let me, because I did not know how to tell it in confession.

  That night at supper—meatloaf—my father said, “Where were you today?”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “What did you do with yourself?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He had a funeral this morning,” Louie said.

  Louie had stopped being an altar boy the previous year, when I started—later than most boys. He had coached me on my Latin.

  “Charlie Plotke,” my mother said.

  Saying his name like that made it seem as though he were still alive; but I knew the body in the coffin was dead and empty—like Hogan’s uncle. I had imagined the pale dummy head in the bunches of ruffles and thought: Nothing—no one.

  “Charlie was a daily communicant,” my father said. He always used these Catholic expressions, like Shrovetide and Septuagesima and Lenten and Triduum and, always solemnly, ejaculation. He jerked his head at me and said, “Who celebrated mass?”

  “Father Furty.”

  No one said anything.

  “He’s new,” I said. “He’s not from Boston.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “He says ‘anny.’ For aunty.”

  Now my parents began staring at each other in a querying way.

  “He lives in Holy Name House,” I said.

  As soon as I had said that I sensed something go back and forth between my mother and father—over my head. It was like a beam of heat, but it was a certain pressure too, shooting right and then left, just touching the ends of the strands of hair in my crew cut. It was an inaudible buzz, and then a hovering bubble of suspense that broke and left a hum; and I realized that I had made it happen. What about that house? What about Father Furty?

  “If you pray very hard,” my mother had always said, “God might choose you to be a priest.”

  Before, I had always thought of the Pastor, or Father Ed Skerrit, and being a priest meant stepping out of life and standing on the sidelines—just waiting there with skinny ankles and a big Adam’s apple, and red hands sticking out of a black cassock. But now “priest” meant Father Furty, and that did not seem bad. They seemed to know something about him, but they would not tell me—they never told me secrets.

  “Two more funerals and you get a wedding,” Louie said.

  3.

  My part-time job that summer was at Wright’s Pond: locker-room attendant, three days a week. I sat at the entrance to the tin building next to the parking lot and read Dante’s Inferno. When people said, “What are you reading that for?” I said, “Listen to this.”

  Between his legs all of his red guts hung

  With the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gallbladder,

  And the shrivelled sac that passes shit to the bung.

  Not many people used the locker room. It was dark, the lockers were rusty, the floor was always wet—I hosed it down in the morni
ng and it stayed wet all day. I had the only key—one key for three hundred lockers. No job could have been easier. I sat in the sun, I played whist with the lifeguard and the policeman, I rowed the boat, I read Dante. Now and then someone said, “Hey, lockerboy,” and I locked his clothes in a rusty box. That was the Men’s; the Women’s was attended by a fat tearful woman named Mrs. Boushay who used to sit with her arms folded and staring at her new Buick and saying, “I wish I’d never seen it.”

  There was a rumor that you could get polio at Wright’s Pond. It had been closed the previous summer for a week, while they tested the water; and even this summer the inspector visited regularly and took a jar of water away. People said Wright’s was dangerous and dirty, and laughed when I said I worked there. Tina’s mother wouldn’t let her go there, and in fact I had never seen Tina wearing a bathing suit. In some ways I was glad that Tina didn’t swim at Wright’s. We had a rough crowd, always swearing and yelling, and she was so pretty the boys would have teased her and splashed her.

  I was at Wright’s a few days after I had served the funeral—it was a Friday—when I saw the girl we called Magoo walking through the parking lot. She was with her younger brother, who was a smaller version of her. They had very white freckled skin, buck teeth, and limp brown hair that lay very flat against their heads. Their noses were pink and peeling, and their ankle socks were very dirty. They both walked in the same sulky way; they were pigeon-toed. Magoo was my age, the brother about ten or eleven, although he had the face of an old man.

  The brother saw a dog he recognized and chased it down to the water, and seeing Magoo alone I went up to her, swinging the key on my finger.

  “Want to go for a walk in the woods?”

  She said, “I thought you’re supposed to be working.”

  “After work,” I said, but already I felt discouraged. She was fattish and pale, her fangy teeth gave her the look of someone who doesn’t believe anything, she had a rubber band twisted around a bunch of her hair. I did not dislike her; I pitied her for being so ugly and was irritated by Tina, who was making me go through this.

  “Just you and me,” I said. “We’ll walk around the pond.”

  She looked very bored and then opened her mouth slightly and let her teeth protrude. Then she said, “I have to mind my brother.”

  “He can stay here. He’ll be all right.”

  She made a face. I hated her for forcing me to ask her these questions.

  “Come on,” I said. “It won’t take long.”

  I was thinking of Chicky saying three fingers.

  “Nah.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to, that’s why.”

  I hated her deeply for a minute and wanted to say Then why did you make out with Chicky? She walked away and I hated Tina, and finally I hated myself. Then I was glad—saved: I hadn’t sinned. I had come so close to committing a mortal sin.

  The next day was Saturday—confession. As always, I went alone in the late afternoon, after worrying the whole day. I waited in the cool darkness at the back of the church behind a pillar, and watched closely, then chose the confessional with the shortest lines—the fewest people in the pews nearby—because that meant the priest was fast: if he was fast he was easy—he listened, asked one or two questions, and then gave absolution. The hard priests gave severe lectures and sometimes sent you away without absolution. “You don’t sound sorry enough—come back some other time when you really mean it.” The Pastor had once said that to me, and I had avoided him after that—I learned to spot his shoes showing beneath the curtain.

  I had been rehearsing, mumbling to myself, all day: I was more than apprehensive—I was afraid. It was the strangest day of the week; I lost my body and became a soul—a stained soul. I had no name or identity, I was merely the sum of my sins. I felt close to Hell before confession, and afterwards not close to Heaven but happy, unafraid and oddly a little thinner and lighter.

  The confessional in the corner behind the Seventh Station had only a few people waiting to go in, so I walked over and slid into the pew. I rehearsed my confession, pretending to pray.

  A hoarse small-boy’s voice came out of the confession box. “And I yelled at my brother.” I had never heard that sin before.

  He left; another person entered and left; then it was my turn. I pulled the curtain tight behind me and knelt with my forehead against the plastic partition. It was a square hatch with riblike corrugations and was strung like a tennis racket. Late afternoon light shone through it, coloring it orange. I heard murmurs from the other side, and then my hatch opened and I saw a priest’s bowed head behind the tennis strings. I had started whispering very fast as soon as I heard the slap of the hatch.

  “Bless me, Father. I confess to Almighty God, and to you, Father, that I have sinned. My last confession was one week ago. My sins are—lied, three times, disobeyed my parents, two times, impure thoughts, seven times, committed acts of impurity alone, three times, committed acts of impurity with other people, once, and yelled at my brother four times. That is all, Father. For these sins and other sins I cannot remember I am very sorry.”

  I stopped, breathless, with a hot neck and burning eyes my mouth so dry my tongue had turned into a dead mouse, and I trembled, fearing what was to come. I could only see the priest’s face as a shadow. His head remained bowed, as if sorrowing for me, praying for my soul.

  He went straight to the sin that mattered. They always did, no matter where I inserted it.

  “This act of impurity with other people,” the priest said softly. “Was it one person or several?”

  “It was a girl, Father.”

  “A Catholic girl?”

  “Her parents have a mixed marriage.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  “Touched her,” I said and the mouse in my mouth became dustier.

  “Where did you touch her?”

  “Up the Sandpits, Father.”

  “On her body or her clothes?”

  “Clothes, Father.”

  “Pannies?”

  I paused on that word before answering.

  “No,” I said hoarsely. “On the chest.” This did not seem as sinful as on her breast.

  There was a short silence. I listened for a sigh, or any indication of what was coming—I dreaded more questions. But there were no more questions.

  “You knew you were doing wrong,” the priest said. “Somehow you were tempted by the devil. Remember, you can fool the devil by avoiding occasions of sin. If you sense an impure thought coming into your head, say a prayer to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For your penance, say three Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. Now make a good Act of Contrition, son.”

  Eagerly, and grateful that it had gone so well, I said the Act of Contrition, while the priest prayed with me in Latin.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, “I am heartily sorry for having offended thee. I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell—but most of all, because they offend Thee, my God—”

  The priest was moving his right hand behind the shadowy panel in blessing. Already I was feeling lighter, happier, cleaner, thinner. I had stopped noticing the rock-hard kneeler and the smell of the plastic hatch on the partition.

  “—who art all good,” I went on, “and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the priest said, drawing it out a bit, making me linger.

  I waited for him to slide the hatch shut. He seemed to be hesitating.

  “God bless you,” the priest said, and I bent closer to the tennis strings. He wasn’t blessing me—he was scratching his ear. “Is that you, Andy?”

  For a moment I could not speak. Then I managed to say, “Yes, Father.”

  I felt trapped. I had never heard my name spoken in a confessional.

  “Thanks very much for guiding me back to the house the other day.”

>   So it was Father Furty.

  I never knew what to reply when someone thanked me. And in a confessional!

  “That’s okay, Father.”

  “Want to go for a boat ride next week? Say, Thursday?”

  “If I’m not working.”

  “Swell. Stop by the house around noon. I’ll provide lunch. Some of the Sodality will be there.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “It’ll just be, oh, baloney sandwiches, potato salad, that kind of thing.”

  “Yes, Father.” I wondered whether anyone in the pews outside could hear this.

  “Now go do your penance.”

  When I left the confessional I tucked my head down and hurried to the communion rail, so that the people waiting to go into the box wouldn’t recognize me. Even if they had not heard they knew that I had been in for a fairly long time, and that always indicated a sinner.

  Father Furty was in shirtsleeves, a Hawaiian shirt, with his black priest’s trousers and his squeaky loafers. He was loading his car in the parking lot of Holy Name House when I arrived—“I’m kind of glad you didn’t bring your gun,” he said—and then we set off for Boston Harbor.

  “Did I mention that some of the Sodality are coming along?” he said. “They’re a great crew.”

  The correct name was Our Lady’s Sodality, but as it was all women I usually saw it written in my mind as Our Ladies’ Sodality.

  “Beautiful day for a boat ride,” he said, and switched on the car radio.

  My father’s old Dodge did not have a radio. Father Furty’s was a fancy-looking one, and I was grateful for it, because it took the place of conversation.

  “Come-on-a my house,” it played.

  It seemed messy, sinful, human.

  “What kind of a tie is that?”

  I had worn it to impress him. I had bought it in a joke shop on School Street with my birthday money.

  “Look,” I said, and squeezed the battery pack in my pocket. “It lights up.”