by Paul Theroux
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.
6.
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.
“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 world
ly 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.
I was sailing along, on Moonlight Bay,
I could hear the voices singing
They seemed to say:
You have stolen my heart
So don’t go way—
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 ha
ving 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.