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 probably 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.