The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “I’m going home,” Francine muttered. “You’re supposed to walk home with me.” Her face was blotched red and white with embarrassment, as was her throat, an archipelago of what might have been the remnants of a stain like mine. Her pale blue eyes blurred with tears. I saw her fighting against the strain of the sort of mass scrutiny I had long ago become accustomed to. I fell in beside her as she began to walk down Howley Avenue. We were not followed. It was October, sunny but chilly, and fallen leaves clattered past us on the street when the wind came up.

  “Do you want to go to Collins’s store?” I said. “I have enough for two Popsicles.” She said nothing. And neither of us said a word more as she led me in and out among a maze of streets until she stopped in front of a large, white, green-trimmed house on Barnes Road, the front door of which came open to reveal a woman wearing a full-length sunflowered smock. She raised her hand, smiled and shouted, “Hello, Percy, you must be Percy.” Her eyes went wide and darted from me to Francine. Soon her face was as flushed as her daughter’s.

  “Hello, Mrs. Dunne,” I said. “Yes, I’m Percy.” Without a word, Francine hurried up the walkway and, upon reaching the steps, broke into a run, making it necessary for her mother to step aside to let her through.

  “All right, then, Percy,” Mrs. Dunne said. “See you tomorrow.”

  I told my mother of my first meeting with Francine, the wordless walk to her house, the uncharacteristic silence and reticent tolerance of the other students.

  “It’s a good start,” my mother said. “Francine and her mother thought it would be better if the two of you got acquainted on your own instead of in a schoolyard surrounded by a lot of other boys and girls.” Her source for this information was Pops, who had heard it from McHugh. She told me not to worry—a little awkwardness was normal on the occasion of a first meeting, especially an arranged one.

  “Everyone knows what’s going on,” I said, sighing.

  “That doesn’t mean it won’t work.” She said His Grace had asked McHugh to spread the word among the homeroom teachers of the Mount. The boys of my homeroom had been told during religion class, which I had spent, as usual, in the library. I told my mother I didn’t think Francine would ever speak to me except to warn me against doing anything that would draw attention to us.

  “Well, give her a chance,” my mother said. “And don’t forget, it’s not just up to her to speak to you, you have to speak to her.”

  “It was your first date ever, Percy,” Pops said. “The hard part’s over. You’re on your way.”

  “It wasn’t a date,” my mother said. “We’re all supposed to be very clear about that.” I knew I wasn’t the stuff that girls’ dreams were made of, not even Francine’s; I was two years younger than her and uglier than sin. As for her, she was from that group of girls whose sullen normalcy and plainness seemed self-generated, as if they somehow suppressed whatever allure they might have had out of sheer antipathy to the notion or purpose of attractiveness. And yet I found her enormously attractive. Beautiful.

  “So you’ll meet her at the same place at the same time tomorrow?” my mother asked. I nodded.

  Looking as I did, and attending an all-boys school, I had had almost no contact with girls. Except for that brief encounter with Abigail and now Francine, I had never spoken to one except when mythmaking or in reply to teasing. I had never stood near one except when, for her, it was unavoidable, and only then for seconds.

  Now here, on Day Two of our détente, was Francine, voluntarily allowing me to occupy her personal space, throwing a few words my way without the intention of being overheard and gaining a laugh at my expense. While it was true that she could not bring herself to look me in the eye, or even to look at any part of me, it did seem she was doing more than merely tolerating me. I was able to smell her hair, even if it smelled of nothing but shampoo. I was able to smell her, her scent that, like my mother’s and Medina’s, was so nice it defied description. I was able to really see her face, her young girl’s ineffably feminine complexion, those pale blue eyes of hers, the meeting of her red hair and her forehead, the pout of her small, narrow mouth, the shallow groove beneath her nose that rose to the midpoint of her upper lip, the perfect little furrows in her lips, the swell of her breasts beneath her books, her wind-flattened skirt, the hollow at its middle and the outline of her legs, her lower legs and the freckles that began just above her high-pulled socks, her creased, faintly smudged brass-buckle shoes. Francine.

  Francine and I met again at Howley and Bonaventure, watched by many students who pretended not to be watching and said nothing to us.

  “Mom says I’m supposed to talk to you today.” Francine looked again as if she was on the verge of tears, wincing with the effort of the task she’d been assigned. She stared wistfully off into the distance with the expression of someone determined not to reveal how badly her feelings had been hurt. “Mom says it doesn’t take long enough to walk home to have a proper conversation. So we should just sit down somewhere and talk. There’s a bench by the bus stop on Military Road.”

  Without another word, she set off down Bonaventure toward St. Bon’s, her books clasped to her chest, her head down. I ran and caught up with her.

  She stopped abruptly, turned toward me, her face suggesting that an outburst of anger was imminent—but she bit her lower lip, faced forward and resumed her determined march. Again I had to run to catch up with her, my large feet loudly slapping on the sidewalk. Mortified, hobbled, I reached out and grabbed her right arm to make her turn around. As she turned, all but one of her books spilled onto the sidewalk.

  “You made me drop my books,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I protested. “I always leave my books in school. I was just going to ask you to slow down.” As she crouched, with one leg bent more than the other, to pick up her books, I saw, for a second, her bare legs entire, and the pale blue, eye-colour-matching V of her underwear. On one of her inner thighs there was a light sprinkle of freckles. I dared not remove my large hands from my pockets to help her. She gathered the books together, wiping dust from their covers.

  “The corners are bent,” she said as she stood up. “They’re spoiled.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted you to stop walking so fast. I can’t keep up. My stupid feet don’t work very well.”

  “Don’t you touch me again,” she said, and began to walk at her previous pace.

  “Can I still walk home with you?” I called. She said nothing, but I ran and caught up with her.

  “Do you have any hobbies?” she said, seeming to wipe away a tear.

  “What?” I said, my tone that of someone refuting an accusation.

  “Hobbies. Hobbies. Mom said you might have some hobbies.”

  I had to say something to dispel the excruciating awkwardness. “I’ll tell you when we get to the bench,” I said. We walked in silence past St. Bon’s, where a few boys and girls were hanging about, posted like sentinels but affecting a lack of interest in us. The bench was almost directly in front of the Basilica, just past the bus stop. An elderly man and two elderly women were sitting on it. The man’s legs were crossed, his arm over the back of the bench in a way that made it clear he and the two women knew each other and weren’t waiting for the bus.

  “There’s nowhere to sit,” Francine said. It might have been a panicked complaint about the utter lack of shelter from lethal objects that were falling from the sky, or a protest against her mother who was supposed to have somehow reserved the bench for us. A tear rolled down her cheek, so I told her I’d been collecting stamps since I was seven. I tried not to think of how lonely and bored you would have to be to collect stamps. I felt as if the Archbishop was watching us from one of the upper windows of the Basilica.

  So I said I had hundreds of stamps, some of which my mother had given me, some I had sent away for, some I had seen advertised in comic books. I had a Newfoundland stamp that was over a hundred years old and though it was worth a lot of money, I would
never sell it. I told Francine that if not for the invention of the envelope by a girl of about her age back in the time of Rome, there’d be no such things as stamps or letters or the post office. I told her that a man in Russia had collected about six hundred kinds of envelopes and that was the most so far. I said I also collected coins and that coins were invented because they didn’t blow away or get worn out the way paper money did. I said I had a lot of Newfoundland coins, mostly Catholic ones. I told her that I was painstakingly constructing a model ship inside a bottle, the SS Terra Nova, the tiny pieces of which I had spent a month painting with toothpicks. I said as much about hobbies as I knew or could make up on short notice.

  Francine looked as though she was greatly distressed by the detailed account I had just given her of the burning to the ground of her ancestral home.

  “I’m going now,” she said.

  I walked with Francine to her house, where her mother was waiting at the front door again. She hurried up the walkway and the steps as before, shoulders swaying, and all but knocked her mother over as she went inside. Mrs. Dunne waved and said, “Hello, Percy.” She looked every bit as fretful and anxious as the day before. I waved back and said hello and then hurried away. But I couldn’t help but fib to my mother and Pops that Francine and I had talked about the books we were reading in school. My mother asked if Francine had introduced me to any of her friends. I said no. “Too bad,” my mother said. “You two could use some reinforcements. Someone chattier than her and less inclined than you to be a bullshit artist.”

  “She started crying,” I said. “I only talked about hobbies because her mother told her to ask me if I had any.”

  “Crying?” my mother said. “Jesus. Her mother must have been afraid to say no to the Archbishop. Mrs. Dunne should have more sense, but you’re not making it any easier for Francine. Maybe I should call it off. Do you think I should?”

  “Give it a bit more time,” Pops said from the sunroom. “Some girls are just shy.”

  My mother raised her eyebrows at me. “Well, what do you think?”

  What I thought was that for Francine and me to break “it” off now after meeting only twice would confirm, reinforce, the already impenetrable view of me on the Mount as a comical freak who would never fit in even with the lifelong help of Uncle Paddy. So I nodded yes.

  “Why don’t you meet somewhere different this time?” my mother said. “Maybe the problem is that the two of you are too much on display. I’ll try to think of something better, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  My mother’s idea, which she had Pops relay to McHugh, who relayed it to Mrs. Dunne, was that Francine and I go to Marty’s restaurant on Water Street for ice cream floats.

  The next day after school, we walked in silence to Marty’s. I held the door open for her, but she stayed put until I went in first. Lisa, the waitress who served my mother, Medina and me on Sundays was sitting by the cash register behind the counter, smoking a cigarette and chewing gum.

  “Well, hello, Percy Joyce,” she said, smiling.

  “Hello, Lisa,” I said.

  “Who’s this, now?” she said, beaming at Francine in a way that convinced me my mother had called her to tell her we were coming. “Is this your girlfriend?”

  I turned to look at Francine, only to find that she had already taken a seat in one of the booths along the wall.

  “That’s Francine,” I said. “She goes to Holy Heart.”

  “Aha, an older woman.”

  I was relieved to see that the entire restaurant was empty. I joined Francine in the booth and sat facing the front window, which was hidden from me by the other side of the booth and by Francine. Marty’s—green booths, wainscotted walls hung with cheap paintings of storm-tossed ships, smiling net-hauling fishermen clad in sou’westers, cheerful-looking Newfoundland dogs with their tongues lolling. But to me the place was the mecca of fine dining. It smelled of deep-frying chips, hot gravy sprinkled with cold brown vinegar, hot fudge brownies buried under Dream Whip and ice cream and chocolate syrup.

  Francine sat facing the back of the restaurant. Lisa, who was dressed all in green, put cutlery, two paper place mats and two menus in front of us.

  “I just want a plate of chips, please,” Francine said, staring at the place mat on which there was a drawing of a smiling man dressed as a chef, his arms folded, Marty written in green above his head.

  “Mom gave me enough for two floats each,” I said, but Francine went on staring at the place mat.

  “I’ll have a vanilla float with Sprite,” I told Lisa, who was one of the few people who didn’t look away or at my school tie when I looked at her.

  Lisa, taking our menus, smiled and winked at me, cracking her gum again—she cracked her gum to punctuate everything she said and did. When she was gone, I said, “You can have more than just chips, you know.”

  “Mom said just chips,” Francine said.

  “I like ice cream floats,” I said.

  Francine stared away from me at the line of empty booths across the aisle, but we were more privately together in the booth than we had ever been before, closer, sitting down in each other’s company for the first time. I looked at her hands. I imagined those lovely fingers doing to Medina whatever my mother’s had to make her squirm the way she had and get so out of breath. I imagined them taking the place of my oversized hands and playing with my dick the way I played with it myself. I put both hands in my pockets and covered my hard-on with my left, pressing it against my lower belly. I stared at the freckled skin between the lapels of her Heart blouse, the hollow of her throat, the V of her chest, the tunic that prevented me, I imagined, from seeing the outline of her bra. Beneath the table, our knees and shoes were little more than a foot apart.

  “You could have gravy on your chips,” I said. She flared her nostrils but said nothing.

  “Have you ever been to Marty’s before?” I said.

  Barely perceptibly, she shook her head.

  “We come here almost every Sunday,” I said. “We have Sunday sundaes.”

  I glanced under the table as she bent to pull up her socks. Her knees parted slightly. Her tits pressed against the edge of the table. They were bigger than they had seemed, though not nearly as big as my mother’s or even Medina’s.

  Give me myth or give me death. I said that Marty owned the restaurant but he didn’t work there because he owned so many things in town that weren’t even named after him that he didn’t have to work anywhere. “He never dresses like the man on the menu,” I said. I said his real name was Martin Barton but he called himself Marty because he didn’t like having two names that rhymed. They didn’t really rhyme, I said, because he was French from France and in French Barton was pronounced “Bartawn,” but people in Newfoundland pronounced it like Martin, so he didn’t have any choice.

  Lisa brought Francine’s chips and my float to the table. A vanilla float—I’d had many of them at Marty’s—was made with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and came with a side bottle of Sprite; you added as much Sprite as you liked when you liked. The ice cream came in a metal hourglass-shaped goblet that was lined with a cone of paper. The top scoop of ice cream was stabbed with a long narrow spoon and a cardboard straw.

  “There you go,” Lisa said. “Francine can share her chips with you and here’s a straw, Francine, so you can have a taste of Percy’s float.” She winked at me again and cracked her gum before she went away.

  I poured most of the Sprite into the goblet and watched the scoops of ice cream rise up to the top. I sucked on the straw and my mouth filled with creamy Sprite so cold I gasped and lost my breath. I heard Lisa laugh.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you want some, Francine?” I’d never called her by name before. She gave no sign of having heard me.

  There were ketchup, malt vinegar, salt and pepper on the table, but Francine put nothing on her chips. “They look good,” I said.

  She picked up a chip with her fingers, bit it in half and dro
pped the other half on her plate. Her small mouth barely moved as she chewed. She pushed away her plate of chips.

  “I have to go home,” she said as though to someone sitting beside her.

  “I’ll finish this float really fast then,” I said.

  I looked at the goblet; the paper cone inside it was about half full. I picked up the goblet with one hand and with the other removed the paper cone, holding it by the rim. “I’m going to drink like a king,” I said, and began to pour the creamy Sprite from the paper cone into the goblet.

  In all my visits to Marty’s I had never noticed that there was nothing at the bottom of a goblet but a hole that the paper cone fit into. The float flowed straight out of the goblet and streamed onto my lap, instantly soaking through my slacks and underwear and onto my hard-on and my balls. Some of the cream spattered onto the table and from there onto the front of Francine’s tunic. There was even some on her face and in her hair.

  I gasped from the shock of the cold and from embarrassment, unable to say a word.

  “WHAT DID YOU DO?” Francine cried. “YOU GOT CREAM ALL OVER ME.” She bolted from the booth, dodging Lisa, who was headed for our table. I tried to run past Lisa in pursuit of Francine, but she grabbed me by the collar of my blazer.

  “You’re not going out there looking like that,” she said. I looked outside. Francine was halfway up the hill to Duckworth Street, not running but, because of the steep slope, striding as fast as she could, legs splayed as wide as a cross-country skier’s, arms pumping.