Pops tried to walk away, but she took him by the arm.
“Imagine that someone drew a picture of the two of you on a blackboard. Imagine it, and then erase yourself.”
“I just thought he’d like to see where I spend my days, where I work, where I teach, where my students sit, and what the lab equipment looks like. He said he would.”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter what he says. Percy would say yes if a cab driver he had never seen before walked into the house and asked him if he’d like a ride to Port aux Basques. Percy is five.”
“Do you plan to carry on all night at my expense?”
“Once more, Pops, just once more and you’ll be ideally suited to write a book. You could call it A View Without a Room.”
I looked at Pops and felt very sorry for him, being dressed down in front of me like that.
GIVE ME MYTH OR GIVE ME DEATH
POPS returned home from Brother Rice one afternoon a couple of weeks before my first day of school and announced that Director McHugh had told him that His Grace had decreed that Percy Joyce, Little Percy, was to be exempt from any and all forms of physical discipline or corporal punishment at school. My mother was so happy and relieved I wondered what exactly I had been exempted from, but she merely said it was something I needn’t worry myself about, now that His Grace had intervened. “He knows how it would look,” I overheard her say later to Medina. She didn’t finish the sentence, but I now know what she meant. It wouldn’t look good if the little Joyce boy were strapped, what with His Grace having preached a sermon from the Mount on my behalf, what with my overly large hands that would make such easy and conspicuous targets for a strap. It wouldn’t look good if, after having been strapped, the little Joyce boy put those hands beneath his armpits in a vain attempt to put out the fire in them. It wouldn’t look good if, thus disposed, the little Joyce boy, eyes streaming tears, walked forlornly down Bonaventure, his big feet flapping like a pair of codfish.
The night before my first day of school, my mother and Medina drank a lot of beer. Pops kept storming out of his room to complain about the noise they were making, saying that even if they didn’t care about him, they ought to remember that they were keeping me awake on the night before such an important day in my life. His complaints did not deter them—not that it would have mattered to me if they had for even if the house had been silent I couldn’t have slept, what with being so wrought up with anticipation and anxiety. I joined them in the kitchen, drank Crush and watched them drinking beer and, when they abandoned their card playing, watched TV with them as they loudly made fun of a Barnum & Bailey circus programme. My mother asked Medina: Who, at some point in their life, has not longed to throttle a ventriloquist or beat some sense into someone who was forever plucking quarters from the ears of strangers? Who hasn’t prayed that some flaming sword swallower would extract from his throat a shish kebab of his vital organs? Who hasn’t pictured an acrobat emerge from a somersault with a noose of rigging ropes around his neck? Who hasn’t wished that the tuxedo-wearing, unicycle-riding balancer of twenty spinning plates would slip and go down in a clattering tangle of sticks and spokes and broken china?
My mother kissed Medina on the cheek, then kissed me on the cheek. They stopped watching TV and played “What If?” In this case, what if the Church hired cheerleaders to tell its story and promote its cause? Tight-fitting-short-sleeved-blouse-and-short-skirt-wearing cheerleaders. My mother had been a cheerleader at Holy Heart. She stood up and began doing jumping jacks. When my mother nodded at us, Medina and I clapped our hands in time to what she was chanting.
There go the Pagans, there they go.
There go the Pagans, there they go.
How do you spell victory?
How do you spell victory?
Split that V
Dot that i
Shake that c-t-o-r-y
VICTORY
YEEAHHH PAPISTS!
Come on, Papists, pump it up
Let them Muslims know what’s up
We have a team, we have a yell
A team that fights like bloody Hell
How do you spell DESTROY?
D-E-S-T-R-O-Y
Cleave those breastplates
Throw those spears
Kill those darned char-i-o-teers
YEEAHHHH PAPISTS
Come on, prove that you have dicks,
Go out and kill some heretics
YEEAAHHH CHRISTIANS, YEEAAHHH CHRISTIANS
They may be the infidels
But we have better cheers and yells.
What is better for the soul
Than Muslim heads upon a pole?
Put his head upon a stick—
Mohammed is a lunatic!
YEEAAHHH CHRISTIANS
Here we go, Fascists, here we go!
Here we go, Fascists, here we go!
Big noses only make big sneezes
We’ll get you back for killing Jesus
We’ll stomp your faces, break your bones
Annihilate your chromosomes!
The Krauts may be the craziest
But Communists are atheists!
We’ve got Hitler, yes we do
We’ve got Mussolini too
Now don’t complain, don’t make a fuss
They’ll do our dirty work for us
YEAHHHH FASCISTS
Kill the commie, kill the Jew
We’re worth more than ten of you
On your feet, let’s hear you stamp!
Can you spell concentration camp?
YEAAAAHHHH PAPISTS
You know the Papists are the best
We’re much better than the rest.
Let’s hear that cheer, you know it well
All Protestants will go to Hell
YEAAAAHHHH PAPISTS
Pops came out this time to protest what my mother was saying in front of me. “He doesn’t understand a word of it, Pops,” my mother said. “We’re just having some fun, that’s all. Throwing a coming-out party for Perse. Tomorrow’s his first day of school, and the last one of life as he knows it.”
“He’s only six! Barely six! You’re biting the hand that protects your son.”
“It’s not as if we’re doing it in front of Uncle Paddy.”
“Soon Percy will be talking about His Grace like that. In front of someone who’ll tattle to McHugh.”
“Old Gloomy Gus McHugh.” She put her hand on my head. “Don’t call the Archbishop Uncle Paddy, not even in this house, okay?”
I nodded.
“We’re just letting off some steam, Pops. Feel free to leave us to it. If you must complain, phone the police and tell them your landlady is making too much noise.”
Pops went back to his room.
My mother sat on the sofa with her thigh against Medina’s, one arm around her shoulder. She kissed her again. I stood on the sofa and kissed my mother on the cheek. Medina got up and put on a record by Patsy Cline. She and my mother danced to “I Fall to Pieces.” Medina kissed her briefly on the lips and slipped one hand between the buttons of her blouse. My mother shook her head, pulled away and rejoined me on the couch. “She was just trying to tickle me,” she said. Medina came over and sat me on her lap and tickled me.
Then my mother began to cry. “Oh fuck, Medina. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I can’t let them have him, can I? I can’t just send him off like a lamb to the slaughter.”
Medina smiled at me but she looked upset. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Perse?”
She kissed my mother on the cheek and pulled her head onto her shoulder, stroking her nylon-covered leg. My mother shook free of her again.
“They’re not even allowed to think about sex. You might as well let loose a pack of dogs upon a flock of sheep. The last thing they’re suited for is teaching. Christian Brothers. Jesus. More like a riot squad. They even look like their specialty is crowd control. And nuns. Nuns attacking with picks and shovels a vein of coal a mile underground would be ide
ally employed.”
Medina told her she was doing a wonderful job of preparing me for my first day of school. “I’m sure he’s not at all nervous about what to expect,” she said.
My mother cried that she didn’t want me going “out there” by myself. Medina held me with one hand and rubbed my mother’s back in soothing circles with the other, murmuring something I couldn’t make out. She kissed my mother on the lips again. I kissed my mother on the lips, but she laughed and pulled away. “Why don’t you go to bed, Perse?” Medina said, stroking a thick strand of my mother’s hair. “Go on, now, go to bed. Big day tomorrow.”
So, the next morning, I went to St. Bon’s, short for St. Bonaventure, the junior school at the top of Bonaventure Avenue, across from the Fort Townsend Fire Station whose trucks, flashing lights and screaming sirens I remember as the seemingly ceaseless accompaniment to the voices of my teachers. The smooth grey stone of St. Bon’s looked as if, fifty years after the school’s construction, it was still awaiting some sort of cosmetic surfacing—paint, imitation brick, stucco, clapboard, something that would make the place look finished. The school was as unadorned, as monastery-like inside as out—long rows of lockers the same grey colour as the cement floor, which itself was the same colour as the outer walls.
My mother wanted to walk me up the hill to St. Bon’s on my first day of school, only, she said, because she was worried about the traffic. She crouched down in front of me and tugged at the shoulders and cuffs of my navy blue St. Bon’s blazer. I insisted on going by myself. “I’m six. I’ll be the oldest in grade one,” I said.
“Don’t be too sure,” Pops said. “A lot of my students failed grade one.”
“He’ll have the last laugh,” Medina said. “You know what they say about men with big feet.”
“What do they say?” I said.
“They say,” my mother said, “that they have an unfair advantage in kangaroo look-alike contests.” I shook my head. “Never mind Medina,” she said. “She should mind what they say about aunts with big mouths.”
“What do they say?” I said.
“Jesus, Percy,” my mother said. She stifled a sob, her hand over her mouth. “Okay, then. Out you go, I guess. Out the door into the big bad world.” She crouched down, took me in her arms and hugged me so hard I felt something snap in my back. Medina reached out a hand toward her but let it drop when my mother stood up quickly, folding her arms.
“Now you’ll be here all by yourself,” I said. “Will you be lonely, Mom?”
“Yes,” she said, dabbing her nose with the back of her hand. “So don’t be a stranger, okay, Perse? Some Joyce men have a habit of never coming back.”
“I’ll come back,” I said. “Do I look anything like Jim Joyce?”
“No,” she said. “Now don’t tell anyone in school that you have False Someone Syndrome. They might treat it as a joke.”
“Okay.”
Walking up the hill to St. Bon’s that first day no one laid a finger on me. But when I got into my new classroom it began. I was called Joyce Face. I was asked why, being six years old, I had yet to wash my face. Nigger Lips. “Jesus, Joyce,” one boy said, “you must have come out through your mother’s arse.”
After school, the indoor part of which lasted less than an hour the first day, I reported it all to my mother, who started to cry. “Little bastards!” I know now that she was worried that one of these taunts would stick, become my permanent nickname, the kind of name that stuck to local “characters,” that forever kept them from being taken seriously and earned for them a kind of fondly ironic mockery, which in order to survive I would give in to, even encourage, and wind up playing the fool’s role that I had been assigned. She told me fiercely that I should ignore people who called me names and do my best to make friends and not become a loner. But I already sensed that not even one of the other misfits of the school would want to further devalue his currency by chumming up with me. That night, I imagined a world beyond the Mount in which, by a string of extraordinary accomplishments, I would earn respect, and the onus would be on others to put me at ease.
The second day, I was surrounded in the schoolyard by boys, and by girls who wandered up the street from Belvedere, children my age, most of whom had seen me for the first time the day before and, so far, were merely curious.
“What happened to your hands and face?” a girl named Nancy asked.
I said my father and I were in a car that crashed into the Block. He was killed and I was scarred for life. There were still bits of windshield beneath the skin around my eyes. She could feel them if she liked. She shook her head.
Most of the boys and girls looked scared, a few scornful but envious.
Over the next few days, I kept changing my story, making up all sorts of lies. It was the beginning of “give me myth or give me death.”
I suffered a syndrome when I was born.
My face turned scarlet when I had scarlet fever.
My sister went aboard of me with a box of Brillo pads.
I said I was part “Red Indian” as the “supposedly extinct” Beothuk Indians were. I was the only living person with Beothuk blood and there was a great deal of pressure on me from scientists and museums to reproduce so as to keep the Beothuk from dying out altogether. None of the children had heard of the Beothuk.
My father was in charge of wild elephants in a circus on the Mainland.
My mother might take me to Lourdes.
My father was killed in the war. My mother was so sad she almost died and that was why I had a stain.
John the Baptist had his head cut off. I might get mine cut off someday. It might end up like his did, on a plate for doctors to look at.
The stain started after I was born and one day might cover me from head to toe. I would smother if it covered all of me. I just had to wait and see. I used to be afraid but my mother told me it was in God’s hands.
I was stained all over, but it would all be gone when I was eight. A doctor was going to fix the stain. I could pick any kind of face I wanted. I would look like everyone else.
I can still see the scared, bemused expressions on the faces of my fellow grade one students, expressions that said, So this is what going to school is like, this is the sort of thing you see when you venture out into the world without your mother for the first time, a boy whose face is purple and whose lower lip is three times fatter than the upper one, which itself is twice as fat as normal, whose hands and feet are the size of a grown man’s, and who holds forth about these things to anyone who asks about them, or anyone who’ll listen. They must have been wondering what else they would encounter as the first days of their expulsion from their lifelong homes went by. What was out here that the grown-up strangers in whose care they had been left would not shelter or protect them from?
As I told each lie, the grade ones who had heard any of the previous versions of my story drifted away and the older ones mocked me for lying. But it was the few seconds or minutes or days of awestruck, dumbstruck credulity that egged me on. Eventually, there were not even any among the grade ones left for me to try to hoodwink or win over. I was seen by all to be some sort of myth-weaving, odd-looking crank who was better left ignored.
My mother found out about my lies from Pops, who found out about them from Brother McHugh, whose source could have been just about anyone.
“Why did you make up all those stories?” she said. “I told you not to mention FSS.”
“I didn’t.”
“They asked him what happened to his face,” Pops said. “He had to say something.”
“He didn’t have to say everything. He didn’t have to contradict himself with every word. Now they all think he tells lies. About everything.” I wanted so badly to describe to her how impressed some of the children had seemed, how in awe of someone so oddly afflicted, someone doomed, someone blessed, someone who had survived a car crash in which his father died, who had been so near to, so intimate with, mystery, who had been
to the Mainland, whose future depended on a Lourdes miracle, who had suffered a syndrome and whose father was in charge of elephants.
“You are like Jim Joyce,” she shouted. “If you must tell lies, can’t you be consistent so it isn’t so obvious you’re lying?”
“Pen,” Medina said, which sent my mother into tears. She took me in her arms.
“I’m sorry, Perse,” she said. “I really wish you’d let me walk you up that hill.”
But I shook my head.
I got more or less perfect grades by doing little more than pay attention in class. I didn’t bring home school work or even books if I could help it. I assumed it was somehow because of my FSS that I was smarter than the others, but Pops said, as he had when we went to Brother Rice, that I took after my mother. “How do you do it, Perse?” Medina said. “I look at a page and nothing happens. You look at one and you remember everything.” I shrugged, though what she said was true. I sponged up words and numbers without effort. I could probably have completed the year’s work in a week—but that was just more evidence, it seemed to me, of my freakishness. I sensed it would do me no good to show off what one boy called my “brains” in class, but I was so bored trying to keep pace with the others that I couldn’t help finishing my every assignment in seconds. The Brothers started sending me to the “library,” telling me I should “read something” until they came back to get me. The library consisted of little more than rotatable trees of paperbacks, a grove of them that Mrs. Crowley, the only woman in the school, watched over as she made up questions for the school TV quiz show that she coached. It was called Reach for the Top. Her team of boys, all twelve-year-olds, would come to the library sometimes and Mrs. Crowley would fire questions at them that I almost always knew the answers to. “What is a waiting line of people called? The word can also be used as a verb.” “Queue,” I said, but they all ignored me and Mrs. Crowley went on to another question. I often sat alone in the library, at one of the long tables, for hours, still bored because the library books at St. Bon’s were less interesting than the ones my mother read to me. I stared out of the window at the trees that obscured my view of St. Pat’s, at drifting snow or gusting rain, and often fell asleep, my head on my arms.
The Son of a Certain Woman Page 9