All this was news to me, and it helped, but remembering that he was dead still made me feel sick — sick, rather than hopeless.
Chicky DePalma was in the sacristy that day talking to Walter Hogan.
He said, “I’m bombing up Brookview to the church, thinking I’m going to be late — and who do I see in a tight sweater, with knobs like this? Yeah! Hey, Parent, are you listening?”
“No,” I said.
“And a tight skirt, and I think, mingya!”
“Cut it out,” I said.
“Parent walks around with a boner all day.”
Chicky had thick lips and spaces between his teeth and hooded eyes and a heavy Sicilian jaw. Whenever he said something obscene he made his monkey mouth.
“So what do you think of Tina the Wiener coming to church with her knobs—”
I heaved myself at him and pushed him against the lockers, banging his head and yanking his cassock. “If you say one more word I’ll kick the living shit out of you!”
My threats didn’t matter, but he had hit his head very hard, and I had torn three or four buttons off of his cassock. He was startled, and hurt, and he saw that I was very angry.
“He’s apeshit,” Walter Hogan said softly.
That was a form of praise. But my reaction had startled me too and taken all my anger away. I also felt righteous — my swearing didn’t matter: I was on the side of sanctity, insisting on reverence and fighting for it. That calmed me down.
Meanwhile, another altar boy — Vito Bazzoli — had walked in. Walter whispered to him, but they said nothing directly to me. I think they were afraid of me — or respected me — at last, and I was glad.
The mass was said by the Pastor, and as it was a requiem he was assisted by Father Skerrit. Requiems always seemed to me like plays — dramas with two characters. The Pastor had the main part, and Father Skerrit had a subsidiary role, scurrying around and responding in a nervous voice to the Pastor’s pompous lines. We altar boys were on the sidelines, a thurifer, and four acolytes, and Chicky with the seven-foot crucifix.
“It’s going to be a closed coffin,” my mother had said of the wake.
There was a meaning in her voice that I did not understand. I had never thought about it before — a coffin closed or open. The dead looked so lumpy and absent with the life drained out of them. But I was sorry I could not see Father Furty again, and I kept imagining his face against the lid of the coffin.
Standing beside it with my candle I felt weak again and I knew I was conspicuously pale and trembly. This suffering was not wholly due to the fact that Father Furty was dead (but how had he died? and when exactly? — I was troubled by the vagueness of it all, and ashamed because I was too young to be told). I suffered, too, because I was not in a state of grace. I had sins on my souclass="underline" without Father Furty I could not confess.
But I could discern a logic in being a sinner and wanting to be a priest. In fact, it seemed to me that one went with the other. It wasn’t piety, but sin, that made someone want to enter the priesthood: it was the only possible purification. Your choice was either that cleansing by the sacrament of Holy Orders, or else you left your soul black and lost your faith. And either way it was a sacrifice — your body or your soul.
The church was more than half-full. I had never seen so many people at a funeral; I had never recognized so many. No one was crying — that was strange; but I heard faint screws of sound, a kind of mewing and soft coughing that was almost as sad as silence.
As we circled the casket — priests and acolytes, Chicky and the thurifer, Father Skerrit with the holy water bucket, the Pastor with the sprinkler — I glanced towards the back of the church and saw Tina sitting by herself. She was sitting, I guessed, because she was not used to kneeling. She wore a blue sweater, and a white handkerchief was pinned to the top of her head. Now I was glad I had banged Chicky’s head in the sacristy.
We went back for the consecration — Father Skerrit did the bells — and then the Pastor waved us to the side pews and walked slowly — still playing his pious role — to the pulpit for his sermon.
In that moment of silence — no litany, no music — I heard some nose-blowing and some sobbing. I was certain they were the women Father Furty had taken out on his boat. Although they had seemed very plain and matronly on the boat, at the funeral, dressed in black, with veils and white faces, they looked almost beautiful to me, the way Father Feeney’s nuns had seemed. Their crying was not loud, there were no shrieks; it was all a soft agony of mourning, and in its muffled way it seemed to me the worst grief.
The Pastor hooked his hands onto the front of the pulpit and hung on and leaned back, staring hard at the congregation. His severe eyes seemed to still the sobbing. Then it struck me that I had modeled God on the Pastor — God’s glare, and God’s scowling face, and even his paleness and his white upswept hair; and both God and the Pastor had narrow Irish mouths that they held slightly open to show doubt or scorn or self-importance.
His silence silenced the congregation, but I knew it was a gimmick. As an altar boy, I had seen all the priests giving sermons — from Father Flynn, who trembled and forgot what he had just said, to the Pastor, who glared like God. Father Furty always opened with a little joke, and he often based his sermons on common expressions, like “throwing the bull” or “down in the dumps.”
The Pastor began today with a sudden shout and I could see people jump and straighten up, and a man in the first pew snapped his hymnbook shut. Usually, during sermons, people read the miracles in the back pages of the Novena book, to kill time. My ironing board caught fire … My son fell out the window … On a recent trip to New York City … Riding my bike on a busy street … My riveting machine exploded throwing heavy chunks of metal in every direction. I could easily have lost an eye or even my life. Miraculously, I was not hurt — not even a scratch. I owe this to the intercession of the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary. I had attended the Novena for nine Mondays in a row and asked especially for protection at work …
No one was reading the miracles now.
“We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves,” the Pastor said in a quoting voice — a sort of halting falsetto. “For even Christ pleased not himself. But, as it is written, the reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me.”
He let this sink in. “Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” he said, and then, “What does ‘strong’ mean? It means strong in faith.” And what did weak mean? It meant weak in body and soul. And what did infirmities mean? Infirmities meant giving in to occasions of sin. And what did we mean by “written”? And why did we say reproaches?
I remembered Father Furty saying, “Questions, questions! ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Do you really mean it?’ Questions like that are a crime against humanity … ‘Why’ is a crime …”
“And not to please ourselves!” the Pastor declaimed.
He repeated this, and defined simple words and made them so complicated they were hard for me to understand, and he went on asking why. The people listened intently because the Pastor’s voice — it was another of his sermon gimmicks — was loud and then soft: shouts and whispers to keep their attention.
I listened. I had never really listened to a sermon before, but when had a sermon ever mattered so much?