My Secret History by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

swallowing his smile with difficulty, as though sipping it.
    The rest of us knew why he had been smiling: “Elvin” Presley. Nothing undermined a warning quicker than a mispronunciation.
    The Pastor resumed—he repeated himself, he criticized us some more—and then he said, “Get on your knees and pray for forgiveness.”
    My mind had wandered. I had been thinking of Tina Spector and
Did it light up?
I had not heard the reason we were praying for forgiveness, but still I prayed as hard as I could.
    “Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said, making a slow sign of the cross with his stiff fingers. “You’re all dismissed except Andrew Parent.”
    The altar boys left quickly, noisily, scraping their chairs, and some of them smirking at me.
    The Pastor did not say anything immediately. He stared at me, he tortured me with the slow contemptuous heat of his colorless eyes, he let me suffer.
    “Why were you smiling?”
    I had been thinking about Tina—he had guessed at that: it had been plain on my face. I frowned in order to stiffen my expression and make it serious.
    “Do you think immorality is funny?”
    “No, Father.”
    He let his mouth hang open and he panted at me in his doglike way. Then he said, “Immorality is a mortal sin. Your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost—”
    He had known exactly what I had been thinking.
    “—If you have impure thoughts you defile that temple. It’s asif you’ve smeared mud and filth on a lovely white sheet that your mother’s just washed. That’s nothing to smile about!”
    “I wasn’t smiling, Father.”
    He winced: he was insulted that I had replied to him—that I had spoken at all.
    “Backtalk,” he said sourly.
    “I was just thinking, Father,” I said, and there was a terrible twanging in my head. I was still kneeling, with my face upturned to the Pastor.
    “Smart, aren’t you,” he said. “You’re very bold”—bold was one of the worst things anyone could be. “I don’t know where you get it from. Your mother and dad are good kind people. Your brother Louie was an excellent altar boy—always well-behaved and very clean-cut. But you just stare and smile, bold as brass.”
    It was always disastrous for me when someone described the expression on my face, and it was—though I cannot explain why—a very common occurrence. As soon as the person said it, I assumed that expression—their saying it made me guilty and silenced me. Now I was ashamed, but I was not offended: I expected to be criticized—I knew I deserved it for my impure thoughts.
    I dropped my gaze and saw, looking behind me in deep embarrassment, that I was wearing sneakers. Another rule broken—and they were very torn and dirty. I had worked the morning shift at Wright’s and spent the afternoon at the Sandpits. Alone, among the steep slopes and ledges and secret places, I had thought intensely of Tina. Isolated places always gave me impure thoughts and anyway I had begun to think of the Sandpits as Hell—like the great naked teasing Hell in Dante.
    “What’s that in your back pocket?”
    I pulled it out and offered it.
    “A book, Father.”
    Instead of taking it from me, he moved his hands behind his back and left me holding it in the air. He twisted his head around to read the title.
    “Dante.
The Inferno
.”
    “It’s about Hell,” I said. “And different types of punishments, for the various sinners. It’s all separate circles.”
    He narrowed his eyes at me and said severely, “Does your mother know you’re reading it?”
    “I think so, Father.”
    “He thinks so.”
    But he said no more for a moment, and I had the feeling that he was at a loss for words.
    “Kneel up straight,” he said sharply.
    I had let my bum rest against my heels. I straightened and raised my hands prayerfully under my chin.
    “I’ve given you another funeral,” he said, and when I did not respond he added, “Don’t you know how to say thank you?”
    “Yes, Father.