The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “Would you be happy to trade your looks for mine?” I asked my mother.

  “Sure I would, squirt,” she said, and kissed me on top of the head.

  “You’re afraid to kiss my cheek,” I said. And suddenly she was stamping my face all over with kisses as if it were a well-travelled passport. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.

  Medina, my aunt, Jim Joyce’s sister, had a kind of Betty Boop look: short, tightly curled black hair, round, dark, lashy eyes. She was more attractive than she gave herself credit for—tall, large-boned, with long, lanky legs that were a touch too thick just below her bum.

  I was first known throughout the neighbourhood as the Joyce Baby, a euphemism that stood both for my stain and for my father being “on the lam”—the expression used until it was clear he wasn’t coming back. When I was old enough to walk with my mother about the neighbourhood, I became known as the Joyce boy. My mother said people made too big a deal of my birthmark. She said they probably thought that if Helen Keller had been given the added burden of my limbs and face, she’d never have amounted to anything. Some thought that physically manifested within me were the qualities of the sort of man who would desert his pregnant fiancée—and so I would forever be a reminder to the world, as well as to my mother and myself, of his inexplicable offence—though my mother also thought that people believed she was somehow to blame.

  ST. JOHN’S DAY, JUNE 24

  I WAS born on June 24, which was known as St. John’s Day after the city, which itself was named after Saint John the Baptist because the site of it was supposedly discovered on June 24, 1497, the feast day of the Baptist. My mother often said that St. John’s was “my city.” On my fourth birthday, my mother, Medina and I went out for an evening walk in my city; at my mother’s insistence, Pops, our boarder and a chemistry teacher at Brother Rice High School across the street from our house, never went anywhere with us. It was a familiar sight, my mother and her not-quite sister-in-law walking about the neighbourhood, my mother and the woman who was regarded as the last vestige of her delinquent husband—and between them, holding their hands, me. On this evening, filled to near bursting with birthday cake, I plodded along, wishing that a tour of “my city” wasn’t one of my birthday presents.

  The eyes of every man we passed were on my mother. Motorists honked their horns, hastily rolled down their windows to whistle or shout something about her, or me, that they would not have dared say to her face.

  “Nothing like a nice inconspicuous walk around St. John’s,” my mother said.

  “You’d be less conspicuous if you tied down or covered up those tits of yours,” Medina said. “I swear that the colder it is, the less you wear.”

  Between those who ogled my mother and those who gaped at me, almost no one, driving or on foot, passed us without some acknowledgement. Many of them guessed her name because she was with me. “Percy Joyce’s mother” was known of even by those who had never set eyes on either one of us. She was known to be an eye-popping voluptuary, so when people saw my face and realized that I was “Percy Joyce,” they knew the name of the better-looking of the two women who held my hands, knew it was “Penny and Percy” they had sighted, Beauty and the Beast, and they acted accordingly.

  “They see you two, but they don’t see me,” Medina said one evening. “I might as well be invisible.”

  “I wish I was invisible,” I said.

  “Don’t mind me,” Medina said. “I’m just jealous of your mother.”

  We walked through narrow stone alleyways and down long sets of stairs in our descent from the Mount. On every landing there was at least one open doorway leading to a bar, sometimes two or three. These narrow passages reeked of beer and cigarette smoke, and the hubbub from within was sometimes such that it sounded to me as if a mass argument was taking place among the patrons. An old man in a sod cap came out, looked at me, said, “Oh, sweet Jesus, I gotta stay off the London Dock,” laughed loudly, and hurried back inside.

  “Toothless fucker,” my mother shouted. “Next time I’ll shove a pool ball down your throat.”

  “Nice bangers, Penny. How’s your mash?” “How’s your shrimp dick, Dick?” “I’d love a clam sandwich.” “Your wife is famous for hers.”

  A group of boys on the other side of the street—they seemed to be not altogether unfriendly—called out to me, “HEY PERCY,” almost in unison, as one would at the sight of the sort of city mascot my mother feared I would become. Being but four years old, I had no better sense than to say hello and wave—which the boys found hilarious. “What’s your name?” I said, more or less to all the boys. It seemed odd that people I’d never seen before knew my name, but I was tickled by it. They laughed, but none of them offered up a name, as if asking strangers to reveal their names was something that Little Percy Joyce was famous for. A middle-aged woman on their side of the street told the boys to leave me alone, at which they laughed yet again and protested that all they’d done was say hello. “Oh, they’re not doing any harm,” my mother said to the woman, who gave her a look of rebuke, shook her fist at the boys and said: “That poor little fella is just as much God’s child as any of you. The Good Lord made him as he is so you crowd should leave him alone.” This, my mother later told Medina, who’d remained silent throughout the exchange, was about the last thing you wanted anyone to do in your son’s defence, to loudly proclaim in public that the Good Lord had made him what he was, that all appearances and opinions to the contrary, he was as much “a child of God” as anyone. What did it say about someone that you felt you had to remind people he was a child of God? “You’d think he had scuttled onto the street on seven arms and legs,” my mother said, and Medina laughed.

  Medina said she didn’t mind the boys as much as the men. “Frig off,” she shouted that evening at a man who said that, judging by the look of me, my mother had never been laid properly. “He botched that job,” the man said. “I said frig off,” Medina shouted. He was standing in the doorway of a house across the street, wearing an undershirt, his pants tightly buckled beneath the bulge of his belly. “I wasn’t talking to you, ugly duckie,” he said. “I bet your you-know-what looks like that youngster’s face. I’d rather eat a plate of chips.”

  “Leave him alone or I’ll come over there and smack your face.”

  “You’ll have to forgive her,” my mother intervened. “She’s not used to meeting men whose daughters double as their sisters.” The man laughed, threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk and went inside.

  “You talk to them the way they talk to you,” Medina said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “It was the politest way I could think of to call him a motherfucker. He did say ‘you-know-what’ instead of what he might have said. I thought one euphemism deserved another.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like you do in front of Perse.”

  “Things will be even worse for him if I shield him from what’s coming.”

  “I could have used a bit of shielding. So could you.”

  “It’s not the same. I beat them at their own game. That’s why they laugh and go away. It’s more effective than ‘frig off.’ ”

  “I’ll stick with ‘frig off.’ ”

  We went past the corner beer bars with their ever-open doors, but in spite of that, they were too dark to see a thing inside. Accordion music blasted out into the streets, the siren call to patrons who couldn’t stand to stay at home. We walked through Rabbit Town, past the haphazardly built houses of the very poor, each with a single concrete block to serve as its front steps. There were no front yards, just sidewalk-overlooking windows with closed sheer curtains that allowed both privacy and light. I caught glimpses of tiny front rooms unlit but for television screens that flickered in the early evening gloom. We went to Jackman’s Grocery Store, on the windows of which prices were scrawled in whitewash. Rabbits hung upside down like talismans in the doorway. My mother bought from Mrs. Jackman three squares of chocolate and vanilla
fudge sprinkled with coconut, pure sugar blocks that I bolted down while my mother looked at me and grimaced even as she smiled.

  We walked through the richer neighbourhoods where grand, many-storeyed wooden houses blocked most of what little light was left. We didn’t go by Medina’s neighbourhood, which she said was “crawling with saucy crackies” who would descend upon someone of my “unique features”—a phrase she borrowed from my mother—like wild dogs. They were brought up outdoors, she said, and knew a hundred ways to steal a nickel. “You don’t want to see my room,” she said, though I protested that I did. “It’s just a room, a table, a hot plate, a bed. A few other things. St. John’s is full of rooms just like it, so I’m not ashamed of it.” My mother winked at me and I fought back the urge to scrutinize Medina to see if she looked ashamed.

  Always, as we turned a corner, a gale blowing uphill from the harbour hit us full in the face, smelling of the sea, of the bilge from foreign ships, of everything that lay between the water’s edge and us: grass, birchbark, deep-fried chips, cigarette smoke, chimney smoke, beer, tar, pitch, asphalt, creosote, the exhaust of cars and trucks, the impossible-to-isolate, indefinable something that was the smell of the wind itself. The wind blew through the upper levels of the largest trees, which shimmered and crackled ceaselessly. Subdued into silence by the onset of night and by the bite of a new chill that betokened fog, we headed home.

  “The old, sad city of St. John’s,” my mother called it when we were back home and sitting around the kitchen, saying that it looked sad and its history was sad. She said it looked as though it had been under water or under ice for centuries, the sea or glacier having just recently withdrawn, leaving everything in a state of rust, the paint peeling, the wood rotting, the stunted trees sagging windward, the green metal street signs wind-warped, bent, corkscrewed, the buildings stained with salt, the pavement potholed beyond repair, the earth cracked and strewn with streams that ever-widened or overflowed with the least bit of rain. My mother read Poe’s “The City in the Sea” to me, a poem about a city that, although it didn’t look like St. John’s, made me think of it, for it felt the same, gloomily submerged in time itself, slumping under the weight of its own history.

  My mother called St. John’s a lot of things. She called it The City of Percy. A City Upon a Hill, which she said was from the Biblical parable of Salt and Light. She called it The City Without Pity and The Glorified Town. The City of Chaotic Traffic because of the number of purposeless one-way streets, dead ends, sharp turns, all-but-vertical cul-de-sacs, intersections that were remnants of streetcar lines that criss-crossed in ways so random they could keep you going in a circle or a square for minutes with no clue from a road sign as to how you might escape. The City of Salt. The City of Wind, The Anemopolis. The City of Aeolus Who Was the God of Wind. The City of Water. The City of Eros and Erosion. The City of Aphrodite. The City of Fog. The City of Fire. The City of Winter. The City of Ice. The City on the Eastern Edge, the Fringe, the Rim. The Little City. The City of Fish. The City of Well-Attended Churches and Overflowing Bars. The City of Big Boys and Girls Heading Home in a Hurry with Grease-Stained Brown Paper Bags. The City of Eccentrics. The City of the Sane, the Half Cracked and the Unmistakably Demented. The City of the Open-Hearted, the Broken-Hearted, the Half-Hearted. The City of Gossip and Unimpeachable Discretion. The City of Piety and Blasphemy. The City of Night and Day. The City of Abstinence and Revelry. The City That Thrice Went Up in Smoke. The City of Milkmen, Meat Men, Cod-Tongue-Hawking, Bucket-Lugging Boys from the Battery and Brow. The City of Shut-ins. Of Homesick Sailors and Too Many Men. The City of Hilarity. The City of Storm-Scorning, Weather-Oblivious, Bar-Bound Pedestrians. The City of Unwarranted Optimism and Entirely Justified Despair.

  The boys of Bonaventure lusted after my mother. A boy with the unlikely name of Squire Coffin would grab his crotch and say to me: “Give my love to Miss Juice.” Some, to my mystification, called her Miss Joy Juice, some simply Miss Joyce, “Miss” being the most important part, invoking older but still young, a single mother, forbidden, illicit, not widowed but without a man, without one through no choice of hers and therefore surely craving what she hadn’t had in years. Some simply seemed to savour her first name, shouting it as they went past our house: “Penelopeee.” “Elope with me, Penelope.”

  I saw my mother pause at her typewriter to listen to them, to the primal ritual of school-day afternoons below the Mount, the bellowing of the boys who could see our house from the windows of their classroom, the house of the beautiful, lonely Miss Joyce who was longing for it from the sort of boy who in her youth had pleasured her as her long-absent husband never could. My mother would laugh even as Pops, the chemistry teacher, clad in his white lab coat, shouted at the boys from the steps, telling them to shut their mouths, shaking his fist.

  My aunt Medina couldn’t afford bus fare, so she walked everywhere. She had a full-body yellow oilskin that she’d bought second-hand from the Canadian Coast Guard. It was too big for her, so she was able to wear underneath it a parka that she had bought at the Goodwill. She had a pair of black workboots that laced tightly up her shins. In rain, snow, wind, cold, she would arrive at our house after her mile walk from her room like a crew member who had just stepped off a stormbound ship in the harbour, her yellow raincoat glistening with water or coated on the windward side with melting snow, wearing a black watch cap inside her hood, and leather-palmed mittens.

  Once she was out of her oilskin and parka, Medina was bone-dry. In the coldest weather she would come in with her hands tucked into her armpits, stamping her feet, which she said felt as if they were being stuck with pins and needles. “I’m cold to the very core,” she’d say. “There’s a ball of ice in my belly that only a beer can melt.”

  She’d spend the next half-hour defrosting by the stove, sipping on her beer, or rather Pops’ beer, which she took from the fridge without asking, while the smell of her mittens drying on the radiator spread throughout the house.

  “I thought I would perish this time, Pen, I really did,” she’d say.

  She smoked Matinée cigarettes; the top of the yellow package always protruded from the side pocket of her hospital uniform or the pocket of whatever blouse she was wearing, because she didn’t have a purse, didn’t want one, never saw the need for one, eschewed one. She believed she was looked at, the rare times she’d carried one, as if she’d stolen it, though her coat pockets were always crammed with chewing gum, Kleenex, lipstick—her only form of makeup—as well as bills and coins and gloves. “Some women, like Pen, look good with a purse,” she said. “Some, like me, don’t. I don’t like accessories, I like necessities.” She was quoting my mother, who had said she liked to feel she could get by no matter what her world was reduced to.

  One day, I strayed away from the front yard just as a snowstorm was about to start. By the time I crested Bonaventure, I couldn’t see a thing, so I turned back.

  As I was heading down Bonaventure to our house at 44, the wind blew the breath down my throat and I wondered if I should run. Then I saw Medina coming toward me, barely visible in the storm, all her clothing flattened at the front and flapping and wagging behind her in the wind, one hand on her hood as, head down, she struggled up the slope, her face turned to avoid the sting of slantwise-driven snow. When she drew near me, she was as frantic-looking as if I had been missing in the storm for hours. It strikes me now how alone and vulnerable she looked, as if her being out in such weather was due to some emergency that she could find no one else to help her with. A woman on her own when the balance of the city was indoors and the outdoors looked deserted but for that yellow raincoat. “PERCY!” she shouted, her voice just audible above the wind and sifting snow. When she reached me, she shielded my face with her hand and hugged me to her with her free arm. When we got to 44 and stood in the shelter of the porch, she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me several times, kissed me on the forehead, on the cheeks and once right on the lips. “You’re a real little bugge
r,” she said, “you know that? A real little bugger.” For my mother and her to stamp me with kisses until I coyly protested became our game.

  That night, lying in bed, I overheard my mother and Medina playing cards and drinking beer in the kitchen. The more they drank, the louder they spoke.

  “I’ve seen children at the hospital who don’t have any kind of syndrome who make Percy look like Rock Hudson,” Medina said. My mother said she couldn’t help but wonder what adulthood held in store for me. “Not to mention young adulthood. Jesus.”

  “Any girl or woman would be lucky to get him,” Medina said. “He’s a good boy. He’s smarter than all the other boys. The day will come when they’ll wish they hadn’t been so mean to him.”

  But she eventually reached the point of making my mother laugh away her troubles by predicting that her very worst fears would be realized. It wasn’t long before my mother joined in. “Future-wise,” Medina said, “his best bet is to get his hermit’s licence.”

  “Or he’ll have to be a Christian Brother or a priest,” my mother said. “In which case he’ll be known as Cleric the Red.”

  “Whatever that means,” Medina said.

  I laughed along with them and hoped that, in their tipsy condition, they didn’t abruptly switch tone as they sometimes did. “If he grew a beard thick enough, you might not even see the stain on his face,” Medina stage-whispered.

  “Oh Christ,” my mother said, again sounding sad, “maybe he could learn to type like me and never have to leave the house.” But then they began to enumerate television and movie roles for which my facial stain would not disqualify me: Helmet-Wearing Deep Sea Diver; Coal-Dust-Covered Miner; Masked Surgeon; Bandaged Burn Victim; Mummy; Hooded Ku Klux Klansman.

  I got up and went out to the kitchen, passing Pops, who was drinking beer in the sunroom. He gave me a little wave and I waved back.