My Secret History (11 page)

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 know.”

“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.

He was seated at a dark desk in a hot room in the rectory, and I thought how miserable it was to have to be inside shuffling papers on such a lovely day. It was bad enough having to wear socks and shoes! I associated hot airless rooms and dusty carpets with the tyranny of old unhappy men.

“Sit down,” the Pastor said, and just the tone of these two words told me I was in for it.

There were no papers on his desk, nothing in the room but a skinny Christ writhing on a wooden cross on one wall, and a vigil light in a red glass cup under an oval picture of the Virgin Mary. The Pastor was staring hard at me, and he put his fingertips together and worked his big clean hands apart and studied me with his mouth gaping like a fish.

“Where is your book?”

“Dante’s
Inferno?
I finished reading it, Father.”

“What are you reading now?”

“Campcraft
, by Horace Kephart.”

He squinted at me. “Did you say
Campcraft?”

“Yes, Father.” He looked displeased. I said, “And also
He Went With Marco Polo.”

I did not want to tell him that I had borrowed more Dantes from the library and that I had found
Purgatory
dull and
Paradise
unreadable. I had liked the noise and motion of the
Inferno
, and I could easily imagine the funnel full of people. It was not just the blood and gore—and the reptiles and the ice—but that the people in Hell seemed real; the ones in Purgatory and Paradise were wordy and unbelievable. The
Inferno
was like life, and some of it seemed familiar. Father Furty had laughed out loud when I told him that the
Inferno
was full of Italians, like Boston. The words “shit” and “vomit” did not thrill me anymore; secretly I held on to six lines that Ulysses spoke to Dante,

“Is that how you’re preparing yourself?”

“Yes, Father.” He blinked. I thought: What was the question? “No, Father.”

It was another trick of priests—not Father Furty—to say nothing, and for you to squirm until you guessed, somehow, what they meant.

“Well, what
are
you doing to prepare yourself?”

To prepare myself for what?

“Praying, Father.”

He stared: he knew I had just given him an all-purpose answer. And he knew I was lying. I wasn’t praying, I was only worrying whether I would ever experience the far-flung world. But wasn’t praying worrying out loud?

“And asking for God’s help.”

His smile was worse than his stare, his silence more terrible than anything he said. And I was trapped in the tick of his clock.

“And doing penance, Father.”

He pounced on this.

“What sort of penance?”

“Doing things and offering them up. Helping my folks. Drying the dishes. Working up at Wright’s Pond”—I was failing, and I knew it—“and going without things.”

He seemed bored, the air seeping out of him.

“Like candy, and—”

He glanced up.

“And camping equipment,” I said lamely, and added in desperation, “And bullets.”

This made him wince. He said, “So in fact you’re not doing anything to prepare yourself.”

“No, Father.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen, Father,” I said in a defeated voice.

“Got a girlfriend?”

“No, Father.” It was bad enough that I was telling a lie, but it seemed so much worse that I was denying Tina’s existence. My lie made her pretty face spring into my mind and made me sad.

He knew I was lying. He was smiling, watching my lies accumulate. I could hear the scrape of his breathing, like a comb in his throat.

Behind his head, a large tufty cloud moved past the window and made me wish I was outside. The cloud climbed, leaving blue sky, and I felt trapped down below.

“What makes you think you could be a priest?”

I said nothing at first. His eyes were perforating my soul. I said, “I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you something. You don’t simply say, ‘I’m going to be a priest’ the way you say, ‘I’m going to be a doctor or a lawyer.’ ”

Though it struck me that it was much harder to be a doctor or a lawyer, I said, “No, Father.”

“You don’t volunteer. ‘Here I am—might as well have a try!’ ” He made it sound thoroughly foolish. “You are chosen! You are called. To receive the sacrament. To perform the holy sacrifice of the mass.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Almighty God does the choosing!”

I wanted to get out of that room.

“You must think you’re pretty darned important,” the Pastor said.

I looked down, to appear ashamed, and saw his thin socks of black silk and hated them.

“Did you ever think you might be motivated by pride?”

There was no point in saying no. I knew I was beaten.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said, and smiled his terrible smile. “The Church has no use for slackers. You don’t know how lucky you are!” He looked aside, then turned back to me and said, “A non-Catholic once said to a Catholic, ‘Do you believe that Christ is present in your church?’ The Catholic said yes. ‘Do you believe that, when you receive communion, God is in you?’ And the Catholic said yes. ‘Do you believe that when you die you have a chance to spend eternity in Heaven with Almighty God?’ ‘Yes,’ the Catholic said. And the non-Catholic said, ‘If I believed those things I would go to that church on my knees!’ ”

“Yes, Father.”

“I would go to that church on my knees!”

I thought: But he didn’t—didn’t believe, didn’t take communion, didn’t go to church. It was easy to say that, like saying,
If I believed men could fly I would jump off the John Hancock Building
. Or,
If I believed what you believed I would die for it
. It was only an if—and a selfish boasting if. All they were really saying was, “…  If, and pass the mustard.”

“That’s a pretty powerful example of faith, don’t you think?”

I lied again, and I thought: Powerful example of a lack of faith, you mean!

“Let me ask you a question,” the Pastor said, making a fresh start, as if the conversation had just begun. “If you were chosen by God to be a priest, and if you had enough sanctifying grace—what sort of priest would you be?”

I was stumped. But he went on staring. His stare said: I’ve got all day to watch you squirm.

“I don’t know, Father,” I said in a pleading voice.

“Have a try.” He seemed friendlier saying this—it was the first kindly encouragement he had given me. I decided to tell him the truth.

I said, “I would try to model myself on Father Furty.”

The Pastor began slowly leaning back as if trying to get me into focus by making me small.

I said, “I was his altar boy. I used to watch him.”

But my words were dropping into a void—into the space that had opened up between us. I knew I had already failed. Nothing I said really mattered, and yet I could tell from the flick of his eyes that I had triggered something in the Pastor.

“Wouldn’t that be the easy way out?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Father Furty—God rest his soul—was alone when he died. He was alone physically. He was alone emotionally and spiritually. Weakness is a terrible thing—it’s a kind of cowardice. It can make you a very easy target for the devil. Father Furty abused his body. Do you think a person can abuse his body without abusing his soul?”

“No, Father.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

It was a cruel question; it was one that Father Furty hated. But I had already failed—and way back, lying about penance and prayer; so I lied again.

“When evil gets a grip on you,” the Pastor said, with a kind of horrible energy, “it never lets go. Never! And you burn for all eternity.” It was what Father Feeney had said, ranting on the Common. The Pastor’s voice was quavering again and the scrape of his breathing began. “That’s why we have to pray for the repose of Father Furty’s soul.”

His chair creaked and he was facing me.

“You don’t want to model yourself on Father Furty.”

I lied once again.

“I think you can do better than that,” the Pastor said.

He meant Father Furty’s disgrace—much worse now that he was dead, because he wasn’t around to repent. He had died and left us with the mess to clean up, getting his stained soul out of Purgatory.

I said yes, I could do better than that; but it was the worst lie I had told all day—not only was it a denial of Father Furty, but it was a claim that I could do something I couldn’t. I was in despair: in belittling my dead friend I had destroyed my vocation. Then I thought: I don’t really have a vocation.

“I think you’re going to work out fine,” the Pastor said, for I had agreed to everything he said. He had me on his terms.

He ended by speaking of the Church. When he mentioned the Church I thought of a church building and saw it very clearly. It was a tiny boxlike thing with a stumpy steeple and very few pews; it was hard to enter and uncomfortable inside, which was why most of us were outside.

“I hope I’ve given you something to think about.”

“Yes, Father.”

He opened a drawer and took out a sheet of paper with typing on it.

“This is the new altar boy roster,” he said. “You’ve had your three funerals. You’ve got a wedding on Saturday. Make sure your shoes are shined,” and put the paper down with his left hand and raised his right. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

“Where are you going with your gun?” Tina said, as I passed her house.

“A wedding.” My Mossberg was over my shoulder, my cartridges in my pocket. I was on my way down Brookview Road.

“Who’s getting married?”

“I don’t know.”

“He doesn’t even know!”

Tina rose from the glider and walked to the rail of her piazza. She encircled the piazza post with her arm and lifted her leg to the banister. There was a lovely inch of lace showing at her knee. She was in the breeze now, her long hair blowing against the side of her face.

“Maybe we could go to the Sandpits later,” I said. “Do some shooting.”

“I’ve got to go shopping,” she said. “When my mother gets back. She’s out—so’s my father.”

It was a sort of invitation, I knew; but it meant now. And now I had to go to St. Ray’s—the wedding, the nuptial mass that everyone said I had earned.

She said, “If my mother knew I was talking to you, she’d kill me.”