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 Carnaclass="underline" 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.
I had never believed that such a priest was possible, and so until I had met him I had never imagined being a priest. He was better than me, but he resembled me. I had thought that I was sadder and more tormented, and that my life was more difficult than his. But he made me believe in myself as a priest; by making happiness look natural and right. I had always thought happiness was a venial sin — that it was selfish. Now when I imagined the priesthood I saw myself with a wiffle and a flowered Hawaiian shirt and black slacks and sandals, smoking Fatimas and singing along with the radio in the car.