by Paul Theroux
“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.
7.
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.
He watched Speedbird winched onto the wharf. Its whole port-side was gashed, and its nose splintered; panels and rails dangled from it; it hung like a huge fish that had been hacked to death.
When I helped Tina onto the pier, Father Furty was standing a short distance away, looking very relaxed with a Fatima in his mouth.
“Wet feet,” I said.
“You’ll be all right,” he murmured, speaking through the cigarette and barely parting his lips.
I was heartened by that—whatever he said to me was always a boost—but when he helped me up his hand trembled on my elbow and I had the impression that he was very elderly and feeble.
All day I had been building up to kissing Tina. It always seemed a long and complicated procedure. But when Speedbird struck Blue Neptune Towing my plans fell apart, and I saw that I was as far from kissing her as ever. We were not even holding hands.
But on her front steps that evening after I walked her home, she said, “Oh, Andy, I’m so worried.” I put my arm around her and without thinking kissed her lightly on her lips. At the time it seemed natural; but my mind kept going back to it and seeing it as amazing.
“Where did you go with Father Furty?” my mother asked.
“Nowhere,” I said.
“What did you do all day in the boat?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you have a good time?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
The next morning the phone calls started, and I don’t believe you and That couldn’t be true. But I was out the door.
When I came back, my mother said, “Kitty DuCane called. Sit down, Andy. I want to talk to you.”
She said she knew everything. Half of what she knew was wrong, but how could I tell her the truth without making things worse? Anyway, she would have believed Mrs. DuCane before she believed me. She was angry that I had taken Tina and not mentioned it. But she had spoken to Tina’s mother.
“We think it’s better if you don’t see each other.”
Father Furty walks into Holy Name House and tosses his skipper’s hat on the hall table.
“Had a little accident,” he says.
“Anyone hurt?” Father Hanratty asks.
“Some wet feet,” he said. “Some soggy chicken salad.”
And then he goes through the business of lighting a Fatima—tapping it on the back of his hand, knuckling it into his mouth, and setting it on fire.
“We smacked into a tugboat.”
And then he winks and heads for his room, where he kicks off his sneakers and grins into the mirror and says, “You’ve really made a mess of it this time, skipper!”
That was how I imagined it. I could not picture him taking it hard, and that was the worst thing about the gossip: he was depicted as a fool and an incompetent and probably worse—I wouldn’t listen to the stories, not even from my mother.
I had a Father Furty seven o’clock the next week, but he did not show up. It was Father Skerrit. I waited for the next mass list. Father Furty’s name did not appear on this one at all.
I went to Holy Name House.
Mrs. Flaherty came to the door. “What do you want?”
“Father Furty.”
“He’s not seeing anyone.”
An hour later, on my way to Wright’s Pond I met Magoo.
“Where are you going?” she said. I didn’t reply—I was thinking hard about Father Furty, my hands in my pockets, walking fast. Magoo said, “I might as well come along.”
She wanted to take the shortcut into the woods!
I got nervous and said, “I’ve got renal colic.”
She looked angrily at me.
“You could get into trouble,” I said.
“I didn’t do nothing!” she said, very loudly, and there was something about her bad grammar that made her seem innocent. I was afraid of her ugliness—she was fat and white and had green teeth.
Everything looked dangerous to me now, especially sex.
That night I tried again at Holy Name House. The windows were dark, and no one answered the door. But I sat on the wall nonetheless—sat there, and prayed, and felt insignificant.
At home—late for supper—I had a sense of desperation: wanting to do something and not knowing what. My mother asked me if there was something wrong. I said no.
“You’ve been smoking!” she said.
“No!”
“Don’t use that tone with me,” she said. “I sometimes think you don’t have a vocation at all. A priest wouldn’t talk that way to his mother.”
It seemed to me that what she said made sense. The way I talked to her probabl
y meant that I didn’t have a vocation.
“What if God calls you?”
But no one called—God was like the rest of them. I was in the dark, thinking of Father Furty, missing Tina. The darkness was silent.
I dreamed of Tina standing in her underwear in front of a mirror. She was barefoot, combing her hair. I could not imagine her naked, and I doubt whether even if I could I would have found it thrilling. I liked this—sex to me was satin panties and strips of lace, it was all elastic and straps.
The following day I served another mass (Father Flynn) and thought: If God calls me I’ll go. Being a priest did not seem bad. Father Furty’s example was the proof that you could be a priest and still have a wonderful time, smoking, singing, listening to your car radio, and bombing around in a speedboat. And I had seen him at the altar during the consecration, with his eyes tightly shut, praying hard. That was the test—with his back turned to the congregation and his face in front of the tabernacle. Only the altar boy could see his face. He was a good priest.
And I also thought: If I’m a priest I won’t have to worry about those other things.
Tina in her Sears Catalogue underwear was a problem that left me feeling flustered and impatient. It would have been a relief, I felt, if someone I trusted whispered in my ear: Impossible.
All that was during mass.
Back in the sacristy, Father Flynn took off his vestments without speaking.
I coughed to give myself courage, and then said, “How’s Father Furty? All right, I hope.”
Father Flynn turned slowly. I saw his hesitant thoughts flickering on his face.
“I’ll tell him you were asking for him,” he said.
“Yes, please.”
Whispering, the priest said, “Say a prayer for him, son.”
This was the Father Flynn who had shouted, The Boss received a postcard yesterday from his brother in Ireland!
The worst of it was that Father Furty was my confessor as well as my friend. I had come to rely on his being in the confession box behind the Seventh Station on Saturday afternoons. He was not there last Saturday; he might not be there next; and my soul was growing muddier. Because he had not quizzed me much I had been able to be honest with him and tell him everything. I had stopped padding my confession with trivial sins (“Used the name of Our Lord and God in vain—three times”) and made the serious ones plainer. I had begun to feel hopeful about Holy Orders. But where was he now? My sins were mounting up—so many in fact that by being denied Father Furty as my confessor I knew only Father Furty could possibly absolve me of this many.
I had finished Dante’s Inferno, and I knew the detailed punishments that awaited sinners in Hell—whirling around, heads on backwards, stinking air, black frost, jumping reptiles, boiling blood, fiery tombs, and ice, and being chewed. I wished I had never read it.
Say a prayer for him, son! I was the one who needed prayers. I knew I was not in a state of grace. I felt guilty, and sneaky, and because I was in sin, very vulnerable.
I went on asking the priests and my folks about Father Furty. No one told me anything. I was not surprised. I felt that to be taken seriously was a privilege I had not yet earned.
Chicky DePalma and I served the ten-fifteen that Sunday.
“Where’s your gun?” he said.
“I forgot it.”
No, I had begun to feel guilty about that, too, because it was pleasure. Everything enjoyable made me feel guilty. I was trying to do penance—I did not deserve to have any fun. But it was no good; I had sinned; and I was losing count.
“I got bare pussy off Magoo again last night,” he said.
My face went hot as I pictured this dangerous sin. It wasn’t Circle Two, The Carnal: torture by tempests and high winds—that had something to do with love. Magoo’s ugliness, her shrunken anklesocks, made it a more serious sin, down among the flying reptiles.
Chicky had got to the sacristy first and had nabbed the cassock with snaps. He stood up—done already.
“Hey, did you hear Furty’s in the hospital?”
I felt numb, my fingers wouldn’t move, but I said, “Yeah,” because I did not want him to know how startled I was.
“He’s going to be all right,” I said. “It’s not serious.”
Chicky grinned at me. His grin meant: You’re kidding yourself.
“He just happens to be sick,” I said.
“Sick means drunk,” Chicky said. As he spoke, he reached into the cupboard and took out a green bottle of mass wine. He swigged some and started to laugh.
During mass I was so weak I thought I was going to faint. I felt panicky, my skin went rubbery and began to buzz; I needed help, from Father Furty. He had to save me.
There were famous altar boys. You became famous by doing something memorable on the altar—showing the enormous holes in your shoes when you knelt down—or holes in your socks; wearing cowboy boots with big heels; having an erection and telling everyone; having a laughing fit and being yelled at by the priest while he was saying mass. Franny Cresta threw up once during mass, and everyone had to sit down while a janitor mopped it up. Augie D’Agostino was famous for tripping on the altar carpet—two or three times—and actually falling on his face. My brother Louie was serving with Robert Libby the time Libby shit his pants, the most famous altar boy incident of all—how his face changed, how he panicked, how he shook a turd out of his trouserleg.
But all these would seem unimportant when I became famous for passing out on the altar—-just fainting dead away at the thought of Father Furty sick in the hospital.
Trying to keep my composure, I decided to listen very carefully to the sermon.
It was one of the Pastor’s more terrifying ones, and it was about Hell—but a part of it that Dante had missed. It bothered me that the Pastor could give a sermon on Hell without mentioning Dante. It seemed that Saint Teresa of Avila had a visitation from an angel—her guardian angel. The angel said that if she continued to sin she would go to Hell, and not only that, but there was a place in Hell reserved especially for her. The angel scooped her up and rushed her to the edge of Hell and showed her. It was a box, like a slightly larger than normal oven. Every bit of it was red hot, and there was only room to kneel in it, or crouch—so she would not be able to stand up or sit down. The angel said that she would be hunched in it—stuffed in this box in the most awkward posture imaginable—and go on burning for all eternity.
“Sit up straight!” the Pastor shouted from the pulpit, and everyone in the church turned to look at me perspiring.
I said to my mother, “I’ve got to see Father Furty.”
“After all that’s happened I think you should get down on your knees and say a prayer.”
Say a prayer. Get a job. Those were her usual responses when I despairingly wondered how to meet the world. Get a haircut. Take a bath. Be glad you’re not feeling worse.
“I’m worried about him.”
“You should be worried about yourself.”
“He’s in the hospital,” I said. “Chicky DePalma told me.”
My mother looked at me sharply: I had told her something she didn’t know. She sent me away and went to the phone.
“Not just in the hospital,” she said, in a triumphant tone of going me one better. “He’s on the Danger List.”
This in my imagination was a long piece of paper tacked to the hospital wall, and names printed in black, one under the other, and some crossed out.
“What hospital?”
“Morris Memorial.”
I tried to hide my desperation.
My mother said, “They certainly won’t allow you in. Not if he’s on the Danger List.”
“I’m not going there,” I said, and went to my room and took my Mossberg off the wall and filled my pocket with cartridges.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“The Sandpits.”
“I hate guns,” she said.
But instead of taking the Hudson Bus to Stoneham
, I walked through the Morris Estates, the Mossberg over my shoulder. At the hospital a gardener yelled, “Hey, you!” but then thought better of it. Seeing me entering the hospital, people hurried to their cars. Father Furty would laugh when I told him that the only way I had been able to see him was by taking my Mossberg out and pretending I was going to the Sandpits to break bottles. He’d call it a fib—it was a wonderful word.
“You can’t come in here with that thing!” the receptionist said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The bolt’s out.” I rested it against the wall of the lobby.
“I’m here to see Father Furty.”
“Was he a friend of yours?” she asked in a whisper.
8.
It was a requiem mass, all bowing and singing, two priests and six altar boys. I was one of the acolytes, holding a four-foot candle. I felt shaky and weak, as if someone had screamed “Wake up!” and slapped my face, and badly damaged it. I had woken up, and it hurt. Until then I had never known anyone who had died—no one in my family, none of my relatives or friends, not even my grandparents—all four of them were alive. This was my third funeral, but it was my first death.
From the moment I heard the bad news I was very silent. I did not speak to anyone at home—they found out the same day, so I did not have to tell them. I didn’t talk, and yet I found it easy to pray. God was still glaring at me out of the hot sky—perhaps listening, but did it matter?
“You are all-knowing, God, so you know that Father Furty was a good kind man, and his happiness was love. His happiness was a way of praying. He must have been good, because he liked me and took me on his boat. Before I met him I felt worthless and unimportant, and I—”
But I had to stop myself It was not that I was rambling, but rather that whenever I talked about Father Furty I began talking about myself. I saw that this was an unfair connection, but I nearly always made it. It was not that he was a priest—he was the first person to make me feel as though I existed in the world; he made me feel I had a right to live. He made me laugh and he laughed at things I said. I was fifteen years old, and he treated me as though I were a whole, large mature person; he listened to me; he gave me compliments and praise. That was why it was such a shock to lose him—because he had been on my side, and now there was no one.