The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  Lisa stared at my crotch, so I stared too. “I didn’t know there was no bottom in it,” I said.

  No colour registers moisture more clearly than grey. I looked as if I had both come in and pissed my pants. There was a mess of still-white creamy foam over and around my zipper.

  Now I was glad Lisa had stopped me. The slope on the far side of Duckworth was even steeper. I would have had to do what Francine was doing now, run and walk, run and walk, through neighbourhoods I didn’t know, my hands and feet flopping all over the place. I would have been jeered at by boys and girls, and by who knows who else, people who though I’d never met them and didn’t know their names knew my name because they knew of me, of my stupid platypus face, and hands and feet as oversized as those of any walrus.

  “I’m going to phone your mother and tell her to come down here with some other clothes for you, all right?” Lisa said. I nodded. “You wait in the men’s bathroom. Go into one of the stalls and lock the door. Don’t take anything off until your mother gets here, all right?” I nodded again and fought back the urge to cry.

  I did as she said. I stood in a locked stall in the men’s room at Marty’s, my thighs sticking together, Sprite and ice cream crusting on my slacks, inside and out, on my underwear, inside my underwear on pubic hair that, at the best of times, looked like the cheapest, most inexpert and wispy of toupées. I hoped that no one else would come into the bathroom while I was there. I thought again of the bottomless goblet, pictured myself pouring the float into it and announcing with such gleeful aplomb that I planned to drink like a king.

  Francine’s mother phoned mine and suggested that we all keep the “accident in the restaurant” to ourselves. She and Francine would tell no one, not even McHugh, and she said she hoped Pops would not say a word about it to him or anyone else. My mother assured her that no one at 44 would say a word to anyone, and added that Lisa the waitress had already told her that she would keep it a secret. My mother seemed as relieved as I was and made Pops swear he would not breathe a word to McHugh.

  “You’ll be very sorry if you break that promise, Pops,” she said. “Very sorry. Understand?” Pops nodded and blushed as if there were many mortifying secrets about him that no one knew but him and my mother.

  Mrs. Dunne said she thought we should make up some excuse that McHugh could relay to the Archbishop about why Francine and I would have no further meetings.

  “An excuse that we can all use when we have to,” my mother said. “Mrs. Dunne says she’s worried about Francine and hopes that her daughter won’t be rewarded for her kindness with ingratitude.”

  “Her kindness?” Medina said. “You’d think the girl was a martyr. I’d be worried about Francine if I was Mrs. Dunne. She met up with Percy three times and barely said two dozen words.”

  “It seems her mother had no better sense than to force her into it,” my mother said. “Try to imagine a girl less suited to lead by example than Francine. On the other hand, I went along with the whole thing in the first place.”

  It was decided that our excuse should be that Francine, being involved in so many extracurricular school activities and spending so much time at her schoolwork in order to maintain her high grades in a new school, simply didn’t have the time and energy to add to her responsibilities. Given how weary and distressed Francine had appeared since she began to “look out for me,” Mrs. Dunne said, the excuse would be believed.

  I stuck to the agreed-upon excuse for my “breakup” with Francine. At first it was not openly challenged at St. Bon’s, but girls from Holy Heart accused me on the way home of having “tried something” with her. They said they had heard from their parents what “really happened.”

  Then the boys started in. “Heard you got some from Francine,” the boys from Brother Rice shouted. “Percy frenched Francine,” they chanted, and the girls answered with a chorus of disgust and sounds of mock retching. “His tongue can’t be any worse than his face,” a boy yelled, further inciting the girls, who shouted back that they doubted poor Percy-frenched Francine would agree with them. Gloria announced: “One of Francine’s brothers wants to be a priest at the Basilica, but Percy told Francine that, unless she put out, the Dunne family would never get anywhere because he’d make sure they wound up in Uncle Paddy’s bad books.” This, or some version of it, became the story: I had tried to blackmail Francine by threatening to get her and her mother into trouble with the Archbishop

  Seeming to lend credence to the accusations was the fact that, day after day, Francine did not show up for school. Girls began saying that she had suffered some sort of breakdown because of something I had done when she wouldn’t let me kiss her and “do things” to her. After Francine’s fourth consecutive day of absence from school, my mother phoned Mrs. Dunne, who told her that Francine had a bad cold but would soon be back to school. But a week and a half went by with no sign of Francine.

  Then word went round that, on the last day she spent with me, Francine had been spotted, red-faced and streaming tears, running up Garrison Hill, sometimes falling in her panic to get home after some sort of “trouble” involving me at Marty’s. Francine had run from the restaurant and I had been prevented from leaving it until my mother came to get me.

  “I’m going to phone that woman again,” my mother declared, but Pops warned her against making accusations she couldn’t prove. He said he had heard from Brother McHugh that the Archbishop was “distressed” about all the stories that were going around about me.

  “He probably heard about them from McHugh,” my mother said.

  She phoned Mrs. Dunne and had a conversation with her that left her seething. Mrs. Dunne had told her that Francine was in “a very fragile state,” that she was under the care of a doctor who said it might be weeks or even months before she was back to normal. In a lisping imitation of Mrs. Dunne, my mother said, “Now I’m not saying that Percy did anything. But Francine doesn’t like to talk about what really happened in the restaurant. She never had any problems before she made friends with Percy, that’s all I’m saying.”

  My mother, arms folded over her white blouse, stormed around the house in her high heels. “Stupid, selfish woman. Blaming Percy for her mistake. If that daughter of hers is that delicate, she should never have put her forward in the first place. She uses her shrinking violet of a daughter to make points with the Archbishop and then she blames Percy when fragile Francine falls apart.”

  Pops came home the next day after school to announce that McHugh had relayed to him the Archbishop’s suggestion that I might benefit from a few sessions with the clerical counsellor at the Basilica.

  “Fragile Francine might benefit,” my mother fumed, “but it would take more than a few sessions. Frail Francine. Yet-to-be-finger-fucked Francine. Faint Francine. Feverish Francine. Francine the Fanciful. Too-tight-to-fart Francine. Francine the Frosty.”

  But the names didn’t help me and the rumours grew.

  Francine was confined to bed, completely done in by the five or six hours she had spent with me, profoundly exhausted from the strain of gamely sticking to a task that all her friends had been telling her was hopeless. Francine had endured, in stoic silence, for as long as she could, my filthy language, the filthy suggestions I made to her, the filthy names I called her when she did not co-operate. Francine was bed-bound because of the toll I had taken on her, because of what she could not bring herself to talk about—the darkly hinted-at event at Marty’s.

  “Jesus, Percy, what did you do to the poor girl?” the boys asked.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “What did you make her do to you? Did you talk her into a blow job or something? Did you force her into one?”

  “Yes,” my mother said when I told her what was being said at school. “A blow job. That must have been it.” Francine had been prostrate for weeks because the Joyce boy had fooled her into blowing him. My mother said it was a classic case of fellatio exhaustion, from which some young women had been known neve
r to recover.

  Francine was in a state. Everything reminded her of Percy. Someone saying “Howley and Bonaventure” set her off. She had no appetite. She couldn’t sleep. She’d had, still had, only a sketchy knowledge of the facts of life. She knew half of this and half of that and none of that at all. As for a boy’s thing, no one had ever told her that anything but pee came out of it. “God only knows how things work on Planet Dunne,” my mother said.

  Three weeks to the day after she had fled from Marty’s, Francine returned to school. When school let out at St. Bon’s, I walked homeward, down Bonaventure, past Holy Heart, and saw Francine out front in the parking lot, surrounded by other girls from Heart, many of them older than her, some looking protective, seemingly shielding her even as they plied her with questions. I saw instantly that membership in this circle of Francine’s was much prized and that, though the circle would shrink with time, Francine had gained a degree of popularity that she would never lose and that, contrary to what we had been led to believe, she had never had at Mercy. She looked as if she had had a breakdown. She was even paler than before, sunken-eyed, had lost weight. On average, it had taken Francine three days to recover from each hour she had spent with me. She looked genuinely convalescent. She probably was, having been so sickly and high-strung to begin with, but she was clearly enjoying herself now, her books pressed as always against her tunic, her long hair brushed back and bunned by what looked like two criss-crossed pencils, but she was chatting, chatting, as animatedly as I’d hoped she would with me.

  One of the girls on the fringe of the circle looked my way. “There he is,” she said. “It’s Percy Joyce.” For an instant I thought that, en masse, Francine-led, they would come running after me. “Leave Francine alone,” one of the older Heart girls shouted, as if she had caught me doing whatever she imagined I had already done with Francine. “Filthy pervert,” another girl shouted. I glanced at Francine, who glared at me as if she was reliving all that I had done to her. “Stop looking at her, Freak Face,” a tall, skinny girl yelled, then stooped to the parking lot pavement, picked up a piece of asphalt and flung it my way. It landed far short of me, but many of the other girls followed her example and picked up and threw anything they could find. Francine watched them for a while, then gingerly put down her books, picked up a stone and threw it, at which the Heart girls applauded and cheered.

  I ran home down the hill.

  “What are they saying you did?” my mother said. “Someone must have said something to them.”

  My mother phoned Mrs. Dunne, who wouldn’t let her speak to Francine, who, she said, had “already suffered enough.”

  “Yes,” my mother said, “because you are too stupid to know she takes after you, that she too is a febrile, simpering twit.”

  Versions of “what happened at Marty’s” and elsewhere were many and various and fast-evolving. I had peed myself. I had dumped an ice cream float into my lap to disguise the fact that I had peed myself. I had squirmed under the table and shoved my ugly face between her thighs. I had smeared ice cream or “something” on her legs. Francine had run home from Marty’s with specks of “something” in her hair and on her tunic. I had put “something” in my float, which I tricked her into drinking from. I was endlessly inventive in my vileness. Lisa had locked me in the bathroom and phoned the police, but my mother and Medina, mysteriously alerted that I needed help, had got there before them and forcibly removed me.

  “How did Francine even know you were in the bathroom?” my mother said. She phoned Lisa, who told her that one of the kitchen staff had seen her hustle me into the bathroom and later told her he suspected I had done something more to upset Francine than spill a float onto my lap. Lisa, who had seen the aftermath of my accident, assured him that she believed me, but the man had since been spreading stories that Lisa guessed had made their way to Holy Heart, where they were further embellished.

  My mother said she wondered if Francine, being Francine, was at this point even sure of what happened.

  The boys on the Mount began to address me as “Joyce.” “What did you do to Francine, Joyce?” they asked, a hint of admiration in their voices. “Come on, Joyce, tell us what you did.” The suggestion seemed to be that whatever I had done had proceeded inevitably from my “nature,” which could be read from, and was inscrutably bound up with, my appearance. The essential Percy Joyce, for so long foreshadowed by and proceeding from the same dark place as his birthmark and extremities, had finally surfaced and the first hapless victim of that surfacing was Francine Dunne, the most vulnerable target one could imagine for an imposition of any kind, offered up to me by her mother and mine, by her mother who, for naïveté, credulity, lack of assertiveness and dread of authority figures, may have been Francine’s only rival.

  Through it all, I watched the girls of Heart and Mercy and Presentation from afar, their school books pressed against the bosoms of their dark blue tunics, all wearing pleated skirts, their bare, pink-with-cold legs showing between their school socks and their skirts, the girls, in a gale of wind, trying to control both their skirts and their hair. The latter blew every which way as they turned their heads about, trying to keep it out of their eyes and their mouths, to which wet strands of it clung.

  But the principal of Mercy called Brother McHugh, who told Pops I had got into the habit of “creeping” around Mercy Convent School, “peeping” at them from behind parked cars, the impossibility of my ever finding a girlfriend driving me to acts of depravity that had all of Mercy terrified. Given that, among the girls of Mercy, my mother said, the nickname for the entire student body of St. Bon’s was “the St. Bon’s Hard-ons,” it wouldn’t have mattered if any of this was true—but it wasn’t. She looked at me. “It isn’t true, is it, Percy?”

  “No,” I said. “Not all of it. All I ever do with girls is look at them.”

  The older girls from Heart tried to convince the younger ones that if they kissed me they would catch what I had and wake up the morning after to find that their faces looked like mine. They dared the girls who said they didn’t believe it to kiss me and find out, and those girls said they would rather kiss a nun’s bare arse than Percy Joyce’s lips.

  “You’re supposed to have your dick circumcised, Percy, not your face.” And so I was called Dick Facy.

  “I dare you to stick your tongue in his mouth,” a tall, heavy-set blond girl said, and the others grimaced and groaned with revulsion. She whispered to the others and they squealed. “Dick Facy,” the girl said, “show us your dick and we’ll give you a quarter.”

  “For a quarter,” I said, surprising myself and her, “I’ll only show you a quarter of my dick.” The girls squealed again, their hands over their faces.

  That’s how close I came to doing something that would have marked me as a fool forever, a boy presumed by parents to be at least half demented, incapable of resisting lewdly exposing himself, so that he’d have to be watched and their children warned from associating with him or ever going near him.

  THE SECOND SERMON ON THE MOUNT

  BROTHER McHugh, yet again using Pops as his go-between, suggested that my mother have a “very serious talk” with me. McHugh said he had been fielding calls for days from parents demanding that I be kept away from their daughters even if I had to be expelled.

  “He has no intention of expelling Percy,” Pops said. “He just wants you both to know how upset the other parents are.”

  “They’re upset?”

  Brother McHugh said she shouldn’t expect the Archbishop to preach a sermon in defence of Percy every time I misbehaved. My mother yelled that I’d done nothing, that I hadn’t misbehaved. She wanted to phone McHugh, but Pops said he was in the Brothers’ Quarters and couldn’t be reached.

  “Girls banding together for safety,” my mother growled one afternoon, pacing the kitchen in her pumps, throwing up her arms, setting her tits into a mesmerizing wobble. “Daughters all over the Mount in flight from Percy Joyce. I can see it now. Paren
ts keeping watch at every window. The sun is soon to set. Penny Joyce can barely hold back Percy, whom she nightly lets loose upon the Mount. Not even boys are safe when Percy is aprowl. Who knows whose milkshake may this time be despoiled? Who knows from what hedge Percy’s hands may be outthrust, what girl’s legs he may slide his hands up even as she stands talking to her friends?”

  When my mother announced she was going to deliver her own Sermon on the Mount, Medina said, “For Christ’s sake, Pen, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t bring us all down because of Francine Dunne.” Pops was not there. He was at the East End Club, drinking beer. My mother went to her room for about an hour and came out holding several handwritten pages. Long after dark she went out onto the back step. Medina and I, standing in the open doorway behind her, watched and listened as she raised her voice to a declamatory shout, Medina shaking her head in anxious disbelief.

  The Second Sermon on the Mount Regarding Percy Joyce

  Unlike other boys, who want nothing from girls until marriage but refreshing conversation, Percy Joyce is aroused by girls and even women, married, unmarried, engaged, the never-kissed, the cock-abhorring girls of Holy Heart. He is aroused by girls he hasn’t even met, by pictures of girls whose names he doesn’t even know—it doesn’t matter to him.

  Such a boy as Percy Joyce disrupts the natural order, the time-tested rituals of unhurried courtship of which the one true, proper end is conjugal procreation. He roams the Mount, a grade-school satyr, oaths and obscenities flying from him like sparks from a pinwheel, a runty, rutting beast of lust, a pipsqueak libertine.

  Percy Joyce will tell you sex is not a sin, that based on what he has done with himself, he thinks it might be fun to do it with you. You know it is a mortal sin to do it before you’re married and that it is a venial sin to do it when you’re married. You know that a married woman must confess to a priest if she does it with her husband. And that it is also a sin if she doesn’t do it with her husband. This, as you know, only seems to be a contradiction. It is actually a mystery that no one but an ordained celibate can understand. But Percy Joyce will tell you that you might as well ask a brick wall about sex as ask a priest.