The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “Hope we didn’t wake you up, Perse,” Medina said.

  I shook my head and sat at the table with them. I sat up late with them. They played Crazy Eights, Cribbage and Auction Forty-fives. They drank brown stubbies of Dominion Ale, poured it into glasses that, when you bought them, were filled with peanut butter, “bonus” glasses on the sides of which were hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. (Pops always drank his straight from the bottle, saying that he wouldn’t stoop to drinking “peanut butter beer.”)

  My eyes watering from cigarette smoke, I stared at the enormous green glass ashtray that had six grooves for holding cigarettes. It was filled with ashes, stabbed with lipstick-smudged cigarette butts, some of them still smouldering, smoke rising in columns as if from a pincushion that would soon ignite.

  “He came out for the food, like always, not for the conversation, right Perse?” my mother said. I nodded.

  We—mostly Medina and I—made our way through a bag of salt-encrusted pretzel sticks and a bag of potato chips. “Your mother’s watching her figure,” Medina teased.

  “You wouldn’t think I’d need to with so many other people watching it,” my mother said, winking at Medina.

  “See if Pops is gone to bed, Perse,” my mother said. I got up from the table and peeked into the sunroom. Pops’ chair was empty, surrounded by what looked to be a dozen beer bottles. I ventured out to the living room, where I saw that the door of Pops’ room was closed and the light was off. I went back to the kitchen.

  “He’s gone to bed,” I said.

  “Good,” my mother said. “Your turn now.”

  “I haven’t had anything to drink. I’m thirsty.”

  My mother quickly made up some Freshie, adding water to a pouch of powder that she poured into a jug. I drank it all, guzzled it greedily.

  “Now, off to bed,” my mother said.

  I needed no further urging. I reached out my hands to her to signal that I wanted her to carry me to bed. I was almost asleep by the time we got to my room. I heard Medina giggling and my mother telling her to stop.

  “The men are asleep,” Medina said.

  “Thank Christ,” my mother said.

  My mother and Medina were sleeping with each other on the sly as often as they could. A woman in love with her brother’s fiancée, a woman in love with her fiancé’s sister—you wouldn’t want that to be common knowledge now let alone back then, back there, in the late fifties. I didn’t find out about my mother and Medina until I was in grade four at St. Bon’s School, not long after I also found out that, in exchange for help with the mortgage, my mother, with Medina’s knowledge but not her approval, was sleeping on the sly with the obscurely named Pops, the chemistry teacher who taught in the school across the street and rented a room in our house. He didn’t know about Medina and my mother, and didn’t know that Medina knew about him and my mother. It was not a good time or place for anyone to be known to be sleeping with anyone they weren’t at least engaged to. A woman caught with a woman or known to be in love with one would likely be sent to jail or deemed to be insane and committed until she was “cured.” For certain I’d have been taken away from my mother.

  In St. John’s, there was, as my mother put it, no separation between Church and Fate. We lived in a neighbourhood known as the Mount, which I’d be willing to bet was the most intensely and exclusively Catholic neighbourhood in North America. St. John’s consisted of a patchwork of neighbourhoods, each neighbourhood at war with all the others for reasons either long forgotten or non-existent unless they had to do with religious denominations, of which there seemed to be no end, each one with its own school board, bus fleet, churches and schools, even the Salvation Army, which was known as The Lowest Common Denomination.

  Catholicism Central. It was a kind of smaller-scale Vatican City. There were seven Christian Brothers-and-nuns-run schools within a stone’s throw of each other: St. Pat’s and St. Bon’s, rival junior all-boys schools run by the CBs, as the Irish Christian Brothers were called; Brother Rice, an all-boys high school run by CBs; Holy Heart of Mary, an all-girls high school run by some Mercy but mostly Presentation nuns; the Mercy Convent girls’ school on Barnes Road; the Presentation Convent girls’ school; and Belvedere, an all-girls, junior school–aged orphanage that was also run by nuns.

  These were known as The Seven Schools of the Mount.

  There were also, at various elevations on the Mount, convents, rectories, dormitories for the CBs, Catholic graveyards, monasteries and the Basilica, the largest cathedral east of Montreal, home of the Archbishop.

  If you started from our house and climbed Bonaventure toward the Basilica atop the Mount, there were four schools on the right: Brother Rice, where I would eventually go to high school, Belvedere, Holy Heart and St. Pat’s. St. Bon’s, which would be my junior school, was on the left, directly across the street from St. Pat’s. Past St. Bon’s, Bonaventure sloped down the other side of the Mount and became Garrison Hill. The Basilica was on your immediate left, the Mercy Convent School just slightly to the left of that, and the Presentation Convent School was on the right, the two convent schools flanking the Basilica. The Seven Schools and the Basilica formed an imperfect ring, of which the Basilica was the city-and-sea-facing centre jewel, the Big B on a Calvary-like peak, its Roman wings protectively outspread. The whole structure seemed situated and built so as best to repel some Protestant invasion force that would have had to scale the ramparts of the city just to reach the outskirts of its Catholic castle.

  There were ascetic, severe-looking Jesuits and nuns, and “normal” priests swishing about in their stark black frocks. There were brown-robed and hooded Capuchin monks who always ventured out in pairs, as if thereby to make themselves look less odd.

  Deacons, final-year seminarians who served as assistants to the Archbishop and the basilica priests, were everywhere, pale, intense, zealous-looking young men for whom the Basilica was their first posting in the outside world, soon-to-be priests, champing at the bit as the day of their ordination by a bishop fast approached and for whom every sighting of Penny Joyce must have been a torment. They each had a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed all the more, going up and down like an air-blown bingo ball, as they looked at her.

  School blazers of various colours were everywhere. There were maroon blazers, green blazers, blue blazers, grey blazers, and tunics of just as many colours, though the blouse and legs of every girl were white.

  And Pops of Brother Rice went about among their black and brown frocks in his conspicuous white lab coat like some obscure official of the Church. The Vatican Chemist, my mother called him.

  When I was on the way, my father went away. It was hard not to see this as cause and effect. Jim Joyce. We’d never set eyes on each other, so he didn’t know what I looked like, maybe didn’t know about my having False Someone Syndrome, but still.

  “Why did he go away?” I said. I was not in school yet or even worried about what going to school would be like.

  “Don’t know,” my mother said, cracking her spearmint gum. “Forgot to tell me, I guess. He was very forgetful. All he took from me was the car and a hundred dollars, which was every cent I had. If he could have towed the house away, he would have.”

  There were no photographs of him in the house, which made me suspect that Jim Joyce had been disfigured too, that I’d inherited my disfigurement from him, but my mother assured me that Jim Joyce had left me with nothing.

  She was already living at 44 Bonaventure when Jim Joyce ran off, having inherited from her mother, the second of her parents to die, the house and a mortgage that was larger than the purchase price because her mother was in arrears in payments. The plan had been for Jim Joyce to move in with her after they were married. When he ran off, my mother expected she would lose the house and likely would have if not for Pops, who answered her Room Available ad in the Telegram.

  Our house was the only bungalow on Bonaventure. The other houses were two-storey or three-storey Victorian
mansions: Bonaventure was one of the more affluent streets in the city, not much affected by the fire of 1892 that burned most of the city to the ground. On the north side of the street, however, none of the mansions remained. Schools, churches, graveyards, all Catholic, had replaced the burnt-out hulks. As a result, the value and prestige of the south side had declined. Bonaventure was, literally and figuratively, over the hill, past its heyday, and located on the far side of the Mount that was crowned by the Basilica.

  Our house had gone up after a derelict mansion on the same site was torn down in the early fifties, and was not nearly as large as the house that it succeeded. On much of our lot, at the sides and back of the house, trees had grown up, incongruous urban patches of deciduous forest that, except in winter, blocked our view of our immediate neighbours and vice versa. There being little more than two sidewalks and a street separating our front yard and the city’s largest school, Brother Rice High School, with its red brick, fortress-like facade, the undeveloped part of our property was all but worthless. Our house was snugly hemmed in by bamboo-thin poplar and birch trees, our front walkway forever buried in leaves, some newly fallen, some so old they crumbled beneath our feet into dust that blew away. Our leaf-strewn concrete walkway led up to a likewise leaf-strewn veranda that was unfurnished and never used. The house was three-toned; the vertical siding that flanked the windows was dark green while the horizontal clapboard beneath them was a rusty red, and the cement foundation was painted with white lime in a vain attempt to discourage cracks. It was, as my mother said, a Plain Jane of a house, unremarkable and easy to overlook.

  Our furnishings looked like the temporary, make-do ones of a family that had arrived far in advance of its belongings. Though cramped, the adjoining living room and dining room seemed all but empty as so much of the shag-carpeted floor was left exposed. There was a compact, rickety dining-room table that was never used for dining, a faded brown corduroy sofa and matching chair in the living room, and a faux leather recliner in the gabled outcrop that was called the sunroom. The kitchen, my mother said, was a “chrome-linoleum-Formica masterpiece” with a waist-high fridge and flat-topped stove complete with removable dampers, and Gyproc cupboards. “Home sweet home,” my mother would say wryly as she surveyed the rooms. But I think that, even had she been able to afford it, she would not have changed a thing, perhaps because she was as incongruous-looking in the house as our house was on the street. Almost any surroundings would have set my mother off to best advantage, but these made her look, as Pops once said, quoting Ezra Pound, “like a petal on a wet black bough.”

  There were two bedrooms on the east side of the house, mine and my mother’s. Pops’ bedroom was on the west side, an afterthought of an extension that jutted out from the house like an extra porch and lay directly opposite the sunroom.

  Medina had a very low-paying, part-time job as an orderly at the Catholic hospital, St. Clare’s. Pops would often say, “Medina, why are you wearing that bedpan expression?” Medina would tell him that one of these days he would wind up as a patient at St. Clare’s and then what would he do, confined to a hospital bed with no one to protect him from her?

  Pops was from St. Anthony, but he seemed to have no contact with anyone there or elsewhere on the island. He had inexplicably inconsistent quirks of pronunciation that Medina put down to his being from such a remote outport as St. Anthony. “There is no outport that remote,” my mother said. “He must have been the only one who lived there, because no one else on earth sounds like that.”

  Pops always called my mother Penelope, but he pronounced Pen like Pay. Paynelope. He had long ago taught biology at Brother Rice and in one class had famously pronounced vagina with a hard g, a short i and the stress on the first syllable: vagana, like wagon with an a stuck on the end. He said he couldn’t help the way that he pronounced some words—he said them as he’d been taught to say them. “Who teaches anyone how to pronounce vagina?” my mother said.

  “At the dawn of time the sky was red, Percy,” he told me. “A bad omen. That’s why things have been fouled up ever since.”

  He had a kind of teaching manifesto that he would sometimes recite: “I will consider neither my time nor theirs to have been wasted if, as they look back over their years at Brother Rice, my students are unable to recall me teaching them anything but that death is not only inevitable but could come at any moment. And I should be doubly gratified if they were able also to recall the motto with which I strove to prepare them for the future: Don’t bother starting today something you might not live to see the end of tomorrow.”

  “Did you ever think that you might not be entirely suited to teaching, Pops?” my mother said. “If you had written Das Kapital, the course of world history would be very different: ‘Workers of the world, disband. Any way you look at it, we all die in the end.’ ”

  The pocket of his lab coat read “Mr. MacDougal.” From a distance, it looked like “Dr. MacDougal.” He walked with his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, thumbs out in a way that seemed doctorly. All that was needed to complete his “look” was a stethoscope, which the strap of his safety goggles protruding from his lab coat pocket were often mistaken for by those who didn’t know him.

  He was so common and conspicuous a sight crossing Bonaventure at exactly the same time every morning in his white lab coat that passersby said, “Morning, Pops,” and motorists honked their horns, in a partly fond, partly ironic way. Pops would answer with a perfunctory nod of his head and hurry up the steps of Brother Rice, his lips drawn in a tight line as if to humbly emphasize the importance of the work that awaited him, like some celebrity who is concerned that too effusive an acknowledgement of adulation will end with him being swarmed by fans.

  In spite of his daily six-pack or so of beer, Pops was quite thin. He didn’t eat much, seemed not to relish food or prefer one meal over another. My mother said he ate little more than was necessary to maintain a heartbeat. He spent a great deal of time grooming himself; the extension to the house that contained his room also contained a small bathroom for his exclusive use. He had a barber’s kit, which he used to cut his own hair and trim his narrow, Hitleresque moustache. He shaved himself with a straight razor. His hair was as thick as the bristles of the thickest brush and he trimmed it daily with electric clippers. Though he was in his early forties, he didn’t have so much as a thin patch, let alone a bald spot. He had the slender, dapper look of a dancer. He sometimes left the door of his room open and I saw him polishing his shoes with a cloth as vigorously as any sailor ever buffed his boots. He would have been the very picture of coiffed and sartorial splendour if not for The Coat of Many Colours. He had but one of them, and in spite of the efforts of my mother and a host of drycleaners, it bore a trace of every chemical that had ever stained it. “What would be the point of having more than one coat?” he said. “They’d all look alike in no time.”

  I watched his comings and goings, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before I was going to the sort of place where he worked. I formed my notions about a “school” from things he said. I watched him drink beer and listened to him ramble on. My mother said his “people” either were deceased or had long ago fallen out of touch. He sat in an armchair in the little sunroom that faced away from Brother Rice, the street, the traffic, the rest of the house, the world. It overlooked the backyard and the house behind us. He drank and drank and seemed to stare at his reflection in the window.

  “I live from paycheque to paycheque,” Pops said to Medina. “I’m not able to put a cent away. I don’t mind doing anything I can for Paynelope, I pay her far more than she asks me to. I do it for her and Percy, but why am I paying for you?”

  “You don’t give me money, Penny does.”

  “Which I give to Paynelope. Which means that I’m giving it to you.”

  “I’m not stealing it from you, Pops. Penny can do what she likes with her money. If you don’t want me getting any, give her less than she asks for.”

  “I d
on’t want to.”

  “The point is that you could.”

  “You’re nothing but a freeloader. I don’t care how you try to make it seem, that’s what you are.”

  “And what are you, Pops? Remind me why you’re giving Penny extra money. Oh, I remember. Because you have a crush on her.”

  When Medina was around, my mother had a way of laughing that made me laugh even if I didn’t get the joke. She opened her mouth so wide you could see her back teeth, but no sound came at first. She’d look around, open-mouthed, until she locked eyes with Medina and then she’d tip her head back even farther and let loose a high-pitched shriek. Pops hated it when Medina made my mother laugh.

  The one thing that Pops and Medina didn’t fight about was God. My mother, Pops and Medina were all agnostics who had been born Catholic. Our house, my mother said, was “secretly a nest of agnostics.” Medina went to church but said she wouldn’t have anything to do with it if she didn’t work at a Catholic hospital and have to keep up appearances to keep her job. Pops said he wouldn’t go except that it was required of everyone who taught at Brother Rice. Even though he dismissed the Bible as “a book of fairy tales,” Pops went to Mass in the Catholic chapel at Brother Rice. Pops was vice-principal of Brother Rice, a position he achieved by an automatic line of ascendancy. A Christian Brother always held the position of principal at Brother Rice, and the longest-serving male lay teacher always held the position of vice-principal, a purely titular one because, were the principal to resign or be removed, another Christian Brother would take his place.

  In the first few months after I was born, my mother stopped taking the sacraments but still went to church, partly to keep Medina company, and partly in the hope of mollifying the priests. While I stood at her knee with my hands held in hers, she told me in gleeful detail of the exhortations to have me baptized that often took place in the church doorway as she was leaving Mass with me in her arms. In front of others who paused to listen and those who, passing by, pretended not to listen, my mother was berated by a succession of priests in a succession of churches for being everything from irresponsible to “a wicked woman” for withholding baptism from me. “You are yourself baptized and therefore saved, yet you spitefully refuse to allow your disfigured little child entrance into the Church of God.”