My Secret History by Paul Theroux

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;