My Secret History

  “It’s fabulous,” Father Furty said, and laughed—his face swelled up when he laughed, as it had when he prayed. “I want one of them for myself.”

  We moved slowly through the sunny streets, the car filling with heat, and the radio still going.

  “I love this tune,” Father Furty said. And he sang, “Skylark—Have you seen a valley green with spring?”

  The radio replied, “Where my heart can go a-journeying—”

  He was more tuneful singing this than he had been singing the high mass. I sat listening, enjoying it. We were in Charlestown, in heavy traffic, and the car was growing hotter as we crawled along, the metal and paint and even the yellow veiny plastic of the dashboard giving off the scorched odor of heat.

  “What do you need a gun for?” he said suddenly.

  “Breaking bottles. Target practice.”

  “And what sort of work do you do?”

  This questioned embarrassed me, because he was continuing the conversation we had started in the confessional.

  “Paper route?” he said, pronouncing it rowt instead of root.

  “I’m a lockerboy, up at Wright’s Pond.”

  “You brought a book, I see.”

  He twisted his head around in order to get a look at the paperback in my lap.

  “Danny,” he said. “Like it?”

  I riffled the pages of the Inferno, not knowing what to say. I saw my underlining and stopped riffling. If he saw the ink he might ask me what I had marked, and why. That passes shit to the bung, one said, and another Spews forth his stinking vomit.

  “Hell’s shaped like a funnel,” I said at last.

  “That what Danny says?”

  His hand went to the radio.

  “It’s a classic,” he said, and then a song seemed to come out of his forehead, “Blue Skies—smiling at me—”

  Afterwards he lit a cigarette and kept driving, exhaling through his clenched teeth. I loved the smell of tobacco smoke—cigarettes especially; it lingered in my face and found its way into my head and made me dizzy. Father Furty’s brand was called “Fatima”—a yellow-orange pack with a woman’s thin face on the front.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, seeing me staring at his pack of cigarettes on the seat. “No, it’s not Our Lady.”

  Father Furty’s boat was named Speedbird—white with blue trim, and before we cast off he shut his eyes and put his big hands together and said, “Let us pray.”

  His sleeves flapped, he looked gray and sorrowful, the wind stirred his short hair; but when his lips stopped moving and he blessed himself and said “Amen,” he began to smile and seemed intensely happy.

  He was tidy and fussy in a boat-owner’s way, and he had the skipper’s habit of coiling every line and clearing the decks and putting things away—“Let’s stow this,” he said, and he also said “starboard” and “port” and the rest of them.

  What made all of this somewhat unusual were the women, six or so, from the Sodality—they were dressed as if for church, they wore hats and pearls, they carried black plastic handbags.

  Father Furty said, “Stow the baloney sandwiches aft,” and the women giggled. He said, “We’ll keep the sodas fo’rard.”

  The women laughed even harder at this.

  “We don’t call it soda,” I said, because I hated to see him being laughed at by those women. “We call it tonic.”

  “Tonic?” He laughed so hard he started to cough. Whenever he coughed he lit a cigarette, always a Fatima.

  When we were under way, plowing through the harbor under a blue sky, Father Furty had a peaceful, distant look on his face. I was happy, too. On this boat everything seemed possible, the world was simpler and brighter, and Boston was not a hot dirty city but a much bigger place, rising out of the sea—with a huge and busy harbor, and islands; it was visited by vast ships. I saw that the city was also the water around it—so it was freer and had more space.

  Father Furty said, “There are so many islands in this harbor—that’s another reason you get so many strange currents running around here.”

  I thought he was going to say more. Any other priest would have. But Father Furty did not say of the islands and the currents They’re like life. They were no more than they seemed; they represented only themselves—which was plenty. They did not need any other significance.

  He said you had to be careful here, what with all the shipping, but that there was nothing to be afraid of.

  “She’s a sturdy boat. She’s all mahogany.” That made him more human too, calling the boat she.

  The Sodality women had also brought food; and it was clear that there was too much of it. Each woman had a basket or a bowl with salad or chicken or a homemade cake or cookies. Mrs. DePalma, Chicky’s mother, had a parcel of cold cuts and pickles which she arranged in a fan on a plate. Mrs. Prezioso had stuffed peppers. Mrs. Corrigan had tunafish casserole, and on the top, she said proudly, instead of crumbs she had sprinkled crushed potato chips. Mrs. Palumbo brought celery sticks with cream cheese pressed into the grooves.

  “From my own garden,” Mrs. Prezioso said, and fed a stuffed pepper to Father Furty.

  The other women urged him to have a bite of their food. They did not eat anything themselves—they said they weren’t hungry.

  Father Furty said, “Aren’t I a lucky guy?”

  He said it as if he really meant it, and he was chewing something the whole time. The women stayed in or near the cabin, admiring him, as he steered Speedbird through the outer harbor.

  “Shipping lanes,” he said. “Very tricky.”

  He inhaled smoke, drank some Moxie and then exhaled the smoke. “See. I keep it in my lungs, so I can swallow.” He tried to blow smoke rings at Mrs. Palumbo’s request, but couldn’t. “Too much wind,” he said.

  The women giggled when he did something funny, and they screamed when the spray flew up and wet them. They wore good shoes, but tottered on them. They wet their blouses, and Mrs. Corrigan got spray on her hat and the salt dried and sparkled on her veil. They offered to help, but Father Furty would not let them.

  “This is my first mate,” he said, meaning me. “His tie lights up.” He made me flash the bulbs for them. “Andy, get me my other chart of the harbor.”

  The women did not like this, I could tell, and they resented my being there. Several times I was in the cabin, and Mrs. Hogan or Mrs. DuCane pushed me aside and said, “Show me how to steer, Father!”

  Each time I backed up and started climbing the ladder, but before I took two steps I heard Father Furty’s voice.

  “Stick around, Andy. You’re my right-hand man.”

  I could sense waves of anger coming at me from the women, like an odor in wiggly lines.

  “He’s reading Danny,” Father Furty said.

  They didn’t care. They showed no interest at all in my book.

  We moored the boat for a while near an island and during a lull in the conversation, Mrs. DuCane said, “Tell us about the sacrifice of the mass, Father. It’s so complicated.”

  “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s the body and blood of Christ. Real flesh. Real blood. It’s not bread and wine.”

  He said “wine” hungrily, making it a round ripe word, and I remembered him drinking it out of the chalice in a glad thirsty way.

  The women sat in a circle around him, feeding him and protesting that they weren’t hungry. He looked like a king on vacation, with some of his subjects.

  On the way back he said, “Next time we’ll do some swimming.”

  “Can I bring a friend?”

  He said, “Sure. Swell. As long as it’s not that other altar boy.

  He’s lethal.”

  4.

  God was always glaring at me out of a hot sky. He was as pitiless and enigmatic as most of the adults I knew—they all spoke for Him anyway—and He said no just as often. But after that boat trip, when my mother said, “God might choose you to be a priest,” it did not seem like the end of the world. It
was God’s choice, not mine, yet if He chose me I could be a priest like Father Furty—with a car radio, and a speedboat, and baggy pants, and a pack of Fatima cigarettes in my shirt pocket.

  On Father Furty’s boat, everything had seemed possible: being a priest, getting married, going to college, earning money, having a future—it would all unroll. Until then, my feelings had been uncertain and whenever I became hopeful and looked ahead, the sky blazed and I thought: It will never happen. The boat made everything larger and different—Boston was bigger, the Sodality seemed truly sillier, the summer was breezier, I felt older and useful. I was proud to know this man. Sometimes I forgot he was a priest!

  Knowing him made knowing Tina easier, though I could not tell exactly why. Things seemed less urgent. I wanted to touch her, but I could wait. I did not feel as if I had to hide—anyway, what was there to hide? I stopped sneaking and stopped trying to think of ways of impressing her. A month ago I had pictured us at the Sandpits and I was in the open, wearing my sunglasses, blasting bottles with my Mossberg, and Tina was waiting for me in the shade, so thrilled by my marksmanship she wanted me to hold her and squeeze her. Now that picture seemed a little silly. We took walks instead.

  On one of these walks in Boston we went to the Public Gardens—rode in the Swan Boats, strolled around the pond. Tina didn’t know that although the Common was right across the street, the laws were different. You could lie on the grass on the Common—or even sleep on it all night—and have picnics and parties and baseball games and do whatever you liked. In the Public Gardens everything was forbidden—no picnics, no games, no sleeping.

  “You can pick flowers on the Common,” I said.

  “That’s why there’s no flowers to pick,” Tina said.

  But people hugged and kissed on the grass of the Common.

  Tina said that because of the laws the Public Gardens were pretty and the Common was a mess.

  “That’s a funny thing for a non-Catholic to say,” I said. “I thought only Catholics worried about laws!”

  There were often speakers on the Common—the black man telling how he had found Jesus; the little group with flags from the Socialist Party; the vegetarian; the ranter who said he was from the mental hospital in Mattapan; the couple from the Anti-Vivisection Society. Each speaker attracted a handful of listeners and a few hecklers.

  “Why don’t you go back to Russia!”

  “Hey, you think they should use people instead of rats?”

  I used to stand and listen to the shouts—back and forth—and I wondered whether anyone meant what he said.

  That day, with Tina, there was a new group, all in black, men and women.

  “They’re priests and nuns,” Tina said.

  I said no, priests and nuns never ranted on the Common—because privately I thought all the speakers on the Common were a little crazy. This group was dressed as priests and nuns, and yet I did not believe they were the real thing.

  The speaker was a short, gray-faced man in a stiff dog-collar. His hair was thick on top of his head and he was very angry—yelling so loud that the listeners stepped away and made room for him.

  “Our Lord Jesus shed His holy blood and died for our sins!” he yelled. He twisted his face and reached out with his hand, “And yet there are those among you who won’t enter His church to be saved!” He seemed to be looking straight at me when he shouted, “Unless you enter that church and cling to the Catholic faith you are damned for all eternity—you will burn!”

  I stepped back, and someone said to the priest, “Wait a minute—do you mean—?”

  “I’m not afraid to tell you the truth,” the priest said. “That’s why I can stand here and tell you that Harvard College and the whole diocese of Boston are being strangled by Jews, who—”

  Someone said, “Don’t listen to him.”

  “—robbing them blind and crippling them. Collecting money! Promising salvation and offering institutionalized atheism. They are selling damnation! One of the leaders of the Jew-Communist conspiracy is Albert Einstein—yes, the same Albert Einstein. But there are others—”

  He named six or seven people, practically choking as he said their names, and some of the audience laughed and others protested. In between attacking Jews and communists and Russians, he talked about Jesus, the Catholic Church, and how everyone who stood aside was going to burn in Hell.

  It was bad when he shouted but worse when he whispered. He was popeyed, and at the end of his speech he made threats against the government and the Archbishop. He was a very ordinary-looking man, but when he spoke his face changed and became ugly and fierce. I would have been frightened except that the rest of the people there either laughed or shouted at him—they weren’t afraid.

  Then he blessed himself and said a loud prayer, and a woman beside Tina joined in, repeating the prayer.

  “Come back, Father Feeney!” a man called out.

  The priest did not reply. He stepped off his wooden box and disappeared in the middle of the priests and nuns.

  The nuns went through the crowd with felt-lined plates collecting money. Even though I was fifteen years old I was struck by how young the nuns were, and in spite of their black cloaks and stiff headdresses, how attractive they were—what pretty faces. All the nuns I knew were ferocious and elderly, with huge bonnets that looked like starched sea gulls on their heads. But these were like the sort of veiled muslim women I had seen in harem pictures, with small white hands and dark eyes.

  After the collection, one of the priests lifted a blue silk banner of the Virgin Mary and they all set off in a procession, singing.

  No one followed them, but I could sense that they had left a certain atmosphere in the little crowd of onlookers, as if their dust was still sifting down on us. The people were quiet and serious; it had all been bluff and bluster before, but perhaps now they were afraid.

  I had heard the notorious name of Father Feeney before, but this was the first time I had seen him. He didn’t come up to my expectations—he looked very ordinary, pasty and small. But I was excited by his shrill voice, by the gangster faces of his priests and by the beauty of his nuns, begging with their collection plates.

  Tina had not said a word. At first I thought she was afraid of Father Feeney; then I realized that she was afraid of me. I kept asking her what was wrong, and she kept saying nothing, nothing. When we were alone, walking through the Common to Tremont Street, Tina started to cry.

  “That guy scared me,” she said, and sniffled.

  I said he had not scared me, or made me believe anything. I had been scared, but I had also been thrilled by his anger and conviction.

  “If I tell you something will you promise not to tell anyone? Will you swear?”

  I said God could strike me dead if I blabbed a word.

  Tina scuffed the sidewalk and said, “My mother’s Jewish.”

  I was startled—I couldn’t hide it.

  “You’re going to tell!” she said. She had seen the excitement on my face.

  “No, no,” I said.

  “I mean, she’s Russian,” Tina said.

  Did she think that would calm me? Being Russian seemed worse than Jewish, and her mother was both!

  I said, “Well, we’re French. Our name’s actually Perron—that’s the way you’re supposed to say it.”

  But the blood was beating in my head and making my eyes throb. It was a wonderful secret. If Tina had been a Catholic I might have given up on her. She was half Jewish—it didn’t matter what the other half was. This revelation made her seem pagan and possible. Nothing was a sin to her. But she couldn’t help it—she was already damned.

  At the altar boy meeting in the sacristy a few days later, the Pastor read out the roster for the following week’s mass list. I had three seven o’clocks and another funeral—Mr. Kenway, from Brogan Road. I was serving all of them alone—that was strange. I turned to Chicky DePalma to get his reaction, but he was whispering to an altar boy named Slupski.

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; “She stuck a light bulb up her pussy, I’m telling you,” Chicky said.

  “Did it light up?” Slupski said.

  “I don’t want to see anyone wearing sneakers on the altar,” the Pastor was saying. His mouth hung open as he scrutinized us, and it made him seem very temperamental and impatient, like a big dog on a hot day. “I want to see clean faces and hands. No dungarees, no whispering. None of this Elvin Presley stuff.”

  It was a warm summer night, with yellow moths flattened against the sacristy screens, and we sat and sweated and listened to the Pastor.

  “What’s so funny, Bazzoli?” he said suddenly.

  “Nothing, Father,” Bazzoli said and began swallowing his smile with difficulty, as though sipping it.

  The rest of us knew why he had been smiling: “Elvin” Presley. Nothing undermined a warning quicker than a mispronunciation.

  The Pastor resumed—he repeated himself, he criticized us some more—and then he said, “Get on your knees and pray for forgiveness.”

  My mind had wandered. I had been thinking of Tina Spector and Did it light up? I had not heard the reason we were praying for forgiveness, but still I prayed as hard as I could.

  “Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said, making a slow sign of the cross with his stiff fingers. “You’re all dismissed except Andrew Parent.”

  The altar boys left quickly, noisily, scraping their chairs, and some of them smirking at me.

  The Pastor did not say anything immediately. He stared at me, he tortured me with the slow contemptuous heat of his colorless eyes, he let me suffer.

  “Why were you smiling?”

  I had been thinking about Tina—he had guessed at that: it had been plain on my face. I frowned in order to stiffen my expression and make it serious.

  “Do you think immorality is funny?”

  “No, Father.”

  He let his mouth hang open and he panted at me in his doglike way. Then he said, “Immorality is a mortal sin. Your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost—”

  He had known exactly what I had been thinking.

  “—If you have impure thoughts you defile that temple. It’s as if you’ve smeared mud and filth on a lovely white sheet that your mother’s just washed. That’s nothing to smile about!”