The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  She said that, when she was pregnant, she told Jim Joyce about her love for Medina because she knew what he would do and she wanted him to do it. She wanted him to disappear. She wanted him gone. She knew he would never tell another soul because he’d be too ashamed to tell and too worried that no one would believe him but instead would think he was just spreading lies about a woman he didn’t want to marry even though she was pregnant, or who wanted nothing more to do with him because he cheated on her or beat her up. What had he done, people would wonder, to make her reject him?

  “I wanted a baby,” my mother said. “I didn’t want him. I wanted a baby very much. Don’t look so surprised. Just because I prefer women to men doesn’t mean I don’t want to be a mother. And lucky for you, or else you wouldn’t exist.”

  She had used him, used Jim Joyce. She knew that, she said, and wasn’t proud of it. She might even have destroyed him, she didn’t know. She was so young and so very much in love with someone else. A woman. Medina. She hadn’t known what else to do. She hoped that, wherever he was, he had put the past behind him.

  “You didn’t have to get engaged to him,” I objected. “You didn’t have to tell him you like girls.”

  She said that if she hadn’t done both, he wouldn’t have run away. She partly got engaged to him, him in particular, so that she’d have a safe reason to spend time with Medina, her almost sister-in-law, if he didn’t leave St. John’s. She didn’t want him having anything to do with the three of us, her, me and Medina. He’d have known I was his son—he wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but he could count and he knew, or at least was as certain as any man could be, that she’d been with no one else. But she couldn’t have him interfering in our lives. Imagine, she said, looking beseechingly at me, how things would be now for Medina if Jim Joyce were still around: she’d have to spend time with him or conspicuously go out of her way to avoid him.

  So my mother did one thing more than ask him to marry her and then tell him she liked girls: she told him which girl she liked. She and Medina planned it together, told him together. It was very hard for both of them—nowhere near as hard as it was for Jim Joyce probably, but hard. And terrifying—he was the only person they’d ever told, and they couldn’t help imagining what was in store for them if Jim Joyce acted out of character and did his best to convince others that they were what they told him they were, two women in love, one of them his sister, one his fiancée. They’d wind up in the Mental for longer than Sister Mary Aggie had ever been confined, perhaps for ever, or they’d be arrested and sent to some special prison on the Mainland where women like them were sent to be “cured” by means that were not very pleasant—and I would have had no one to care for me but Jim Joyce, from whom I would almost certainly have been taken because of my “specialness” and put in some home unless he beat the authorities to it and, before fleeing the province, left me on the doorstep of people whose job it was to be the custodians of ill-fated children.

  “But you tricked him. That’s why he went away. You made him go away. You made him feel so bad he went away. But you’ve always blamed him for going away.”

  “I’ve just been keeping up a false front. People expect me to be bitter and to blame him for leaving me, pregnant and engaged. So I do.”

  “I bet he still feels bad.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He might have told on you.”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. No one would have believed him. He knocked me up, after all. He wasn’t in love with me and he wasn’t close with Medina. His own sister doesn’t miss him. I doubt that he misses her.”

  “Maybe he misses me.”

  “If he misses anyone, he misses you.”

  “He wouldn’t if he ever met me. If he ever saw me.”

  I started crying, not bothering to hide or wipe away the tears that streamed down my cheeks. “I bet he isn’t very happy now. I bet he hates you and Medina. And he’d hate me too.”

  “People have moved on from far worse.”

  “You don’t feel sorry for what you did, do you?” I clambered to my ungainly feet and turned my back to her.

  She said she did feel sorry but she’d lose no sleep if she had to do it again. If you couldn’t control certain circumstances, you had to find a way to deal with them. If people knew about Medina and her, we’d have no friends, no allies, and I’d certainly have no one looking out for me, let alone someone on a par with Uncle Paddy. Everyone would be against us. She wanted a child and knew of only one way of having one that she and Medina could bear to live with. And even so, she was taking a big risk with the lives of all four of us, five if you included Pops.

  I turned in time to see Medina, eyes red and swollen, walking back to the blanket, a fresh cigarette between her fingers. Medina knelt and sat on her heels beside my mother. I wiped my own eyes but stayed put. I asked my mother if she liked doing it with Pops and she asked me if I thought I would like to do it with Pops. I asked Medina if she would do it with a man if she had to and she said that a man would only do it with her if he had to. She said that, where men were concerned, she was still a virgin.

  “Girls who do it with girls are lizzies,” I shouted at them. I’d known for years, but it felt, now that they were confiding in me, as if I had just discovered that my mother and my aunt were lizzies. “Lizzies are crazy. The Mental is full of Crazy Lizzies.”

  “I’m sure they could find room for two more. Officially, the powers that be may have just decided lizzies aren’t criminals anymore but it’s not the long arm of the law we have to worry about, it’s the long arm of Uncle Paddy—at a word from him, we could all be locked up in one place or another. Anyway, people would find a way to get us into the Mental—things don’t just change overnight because of some law that almost everyone in this city and this country disapproves of. So please, please keep this to yourself,” my mother said. “We decided we could trust you. You’re almost thirteen. We thought you should know the truth. We love you.”

  “I won’t tell on you. Who’d believe a fucking retard like Percy Joyce?”

  “Perse,” my mother cried. Medina stood up and started toward me, arms outstretched. I backed up and she stopped.

  “Maybe I’ll just run off like your brother did,” I taunted her. “You made your own brother run away. You were jealous of your own brother. You still are.” I turned my back on them, stumbling to the nearest rock and sat down, staring away into the fog as if I wanted to be left there, wanted my mother and Medina to go home and forget they’d ever heard of me.

  “Get used to it, Perse,” my mother said, gently raising her voice. “I like girls. Men just don’t float my boat. No offence. They don’t float my boat, or turn my crank, and they’re not my cup of tea.”

  Now, bawling from sheer spite, I cried at her that I bet that, if she’d liked boys, if Jim Joyce had floated her boat, I might have been a normal baby, because women who didn’t like men had babies who were all fucked up.

  She said she knew of other girl-loving women whose babies were not fucked up, not that she thought of me as being fucked up.

  “I had boyfriends, Perse. Before Jim Joyce. They did it to me, but they didn’t do it for me, that’s all. I thought that would change when I got older. I’m not sorry it didn’t. And I’m not going to apologize to you for being what you call a Crazy Lizzie. I lost a whole fleet of boats before I found out what was sinking them.”

  “That’s a pretty picture,” Medina muttered.

  I began to feel foolish staring off into the fog. I went back to the blanket and sat down. “Some night,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, “Pops is going to catch you. You think he won’t, but he will.”

  “We’re careful. I phone Medina after Pops has gone to bed. Then Medina comes over. Late. About once a week. Sometimes she’s at our house, she goes home, I call her, she comes back, and later she goes home again.”

  “The things we do for love,” Medina said. “Not to mention the things we do for the mort
gage.”

  “The mortgage is why I do it,” my mother said. “And just once a month. I always go to his room. He’s never been in my bed. We don’t kiss on the lips.”

  “Every night that you don’t call, I think about it.” Medina smiled at her. “And I sit by the phone every night, even when you’ve told me you won’t be calling, just in case you do. I fall asleep by it. And when you do call, I have to go down the garbage lane and sneak in by the back, and later sneak back home again. All you have to do is use the phone.”

  “It’s not ideal for either one of us,” my mother said.

  “What would Pops do if he caught you?” I said.

  “Jesus.” Medina put her head in her hands and shook it back and forth.

  “Pops is Pops, thank God. Just remember that if we’re caught by anyone, they’ll take you away from me. For good. So keep your mouth shut, Perse. No tall tales at school. I don’t want to hear that you suddenly claimed to be well versed in the ways of Crazy Lizzies. We’ll all be fine, we’ll all stay together, as long as we keep this a secret. A solemn secret. I wasn’t sure about telling you because nothing is more important than this. Perse, you have to be as careful as Medina and me. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  Medina resumed her station against the rock, one foot flat against it as she smoked a cigarette of which little remained but the glowing filter. I watched her throw it aside emphatically as if thereby to rid herself of all the thoughts that were running through her mind. She turned back to us.

  “The two of you would be just fine if not for me,” Medina said. “A mother and her son. If I stay, it will always be the way it is. Lies and secrets and sneaking around, wondering when we’ll be caught, how much time we still have left. It would be better for you two with me out of the picture. Maybe Percy’s right. What if Pops had heard me making funny noises? What if he had looked into the room? I remember how upset you said Percy was that night. I didn’t see him, I was too busy clearing out of the house like a thief who’d been caught in the act. Percy could just as easily have gone to Pops’ room instead of to the basement.”

  Medina came over to me, stood me up and took me in her arms, resting her cheek on my head. “Completely out of the picture is where I need to be,” she said. “But what would be the point of me if not for you and Perse, Pen? I don’t even have the nerve to ride in a car. You’d get by no matter what. Not me.”

  My mother quickly stood, pried me apart from Medina, took her face between her hands and firmly kissed her on the lips. She just as quickly moved away and glanced back at the road.

  “You see?” Medina said. “You never know who might be watching, even up here.”

  “Don’t ever speak again about completely removing yourself,” my mother said. “It would destroy me. And Perse. We’ve had our talk with Perse, so let’s go home.”

  The fog cleared for an instant, and we stood silently, looking down to the harbour far below. My mother and I picked up the remains of the picnic and packed them in the cardboard box.

  “Why do you love me, Pen?” Medina demanded.

  “Oh Jesus, Medina, don’t start up with that again. Why do you love me?”

  “I think maybe I’m the only lizzie you’ve ever met. I think maybe if you met one who could read and write and was smart and looked even half as good as you, you’d say so long to Medina.”

  “You know that’s not true. It’s a hurtful thing to say.”

  Medina angrily tossed aside her cigarette. “You don’t know what it’s like. Who would want to steal me away from you? Who would want to steal me away from anyone?”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers? That’s what you’re saying. I didn’t settle for you. Jesus, Medina.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I’m just saying it’s not easy—”

  “—having what you think you don’t deserve and what everybody else not only wants but thinks is available?”

  “See? You put me into words better than I do. But why do you need me?”

  “I need you because you’re you, period. I love you. I love what I see when I look at you. I don’t have to count the ways. I don’t have to put it into words.”

  Medina turned back to look at her. My mother smiled at her. “I’ll start down the hill after you’re gone,” Medina said.

  My mother took my hand and we walked to the car. She put the cardboard box in the back seat again, and after a great deal of effort she managed to turn the Rambler around, spinning the steering wheel as fast as she could.

  As we began down the hill, with our headlights cutting a thin path through the fog, I knelt backward in my seat to watch Medina. She was posed exactly as she had been when we arrived, leaning against the rock. But she was watching us this time. I waved to her and she waved back. I turned to see my mother wave to her in the rear-view mirror, then blow her a kiss. I turned again and saw Medina blow back her kiss, then put her cigarette in her mouth, both hands in her parka, the sole of one foot lifted against the rock. She receded into the distance, faded into the fog as the car took us back down into the sunlight of St. John’s. “She should have come with us,” I said.

  “She’ll be all right. She’s used to walking by herself. God knows what we’ve done to your mind, Percy,” she said as she struggled with the clutch. She tried to explain the Oedipus and Electra complexes to me. “For you, it must be like having a head-on collision of complexes.” I had witnessed, she said, a version of what Freud called “the primal scene.” Not my mother and father, but my mother and my father’s sister, having sex. So she modified the Freudian complexes to fit my circumstances and hers: I subconsciously wanted to murder my father for abandoning me, my father’s sister for sleeping with my mother, Pops for sleeping with my mother, my mother for sleeping with everyone, my father included, every male on the Mount for wanting to sleep with my mother, every female on the Mount for pretending not to want to sleep with her. According to the new Percy Joyce complex, she said, a boy’s early childhood instills in him a desire to kill everyone he ever meets. “But I suppose it only works that way if the boy’s mother is Penny Joyce. Christ, I’m such a slut.” Smiling wryly, she added, “But feel free to contradict me. I contradicted you when you said I was a whore and a hag.”

  “Once a month with Pops?” I said. “The same day every month?”

  “Yes,” she said, “Pops’ time of the month. I go to his room. For a little while. Late. But don’t even bother asking me which day. And promise me you’ll never listen at his door.”

  “I never listened at your door,” I said. “You left the door open.”

  “Promise,” she said.

  “I promise. You and Medina—I bet it’s more than once a week.”

  “That’s none of your business. If you try to catch us, you’ll wind up staying awake all night every night. We’re very discreet.”

  “I already caught you once.”

  “Jesus, 44 is not your average Bonaventure house, is it, Perse?”

  “No.”

  “I doubt it would qualify as an average house anywhere in the world. So, are you all right? Never mind the complexes—that was just for fun.”

  “I’m all right.” I said it with as much conviction as I could muster, which was a great deal more than I felt. I had long known that Crazy Lizzies could wind up in the Mental, but the furtive manner of my mother and Medina’s admission, the fog they had conjured up, it almost seemed to me for the occasion, had made that fate seem real at last. I could lose them both. They could lose each other. Where would I end up? What would be my version of the Mental, what sort of institution would a boy as disfigured as I was, a boy whose mother and aunt had humiliated Uncle Paddy, end up in?

  There followed nights when they put on the record player after Pops had gone to bed. Taking off their shoes, they slow-danced to Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Kitty Wells. “I’m crazy for lovin’ you,” Patsy Cline sang as my mother and Medina made their way around the living room floor, Medina leaning her head on my moth
er’s shoulder, my mother smiling at me as I watched, sometimes beckoning to me to join them, which I did, the three of us in a huddle, my arms around their waists, my face pressed sideways against my mother’s breast. “Your mother’s a good dancer,” Medina said dreamily, her eyes closed as Patsy sang about walking after midnight, in the moonlight. I knew why, on such nights, I was allowed to stay up so late, knew that it was in case Pops, for whatever unlikely reason, emerged from his room. If he did, there I’d be, making the sight of my mother and Medina, and sometimes me, dancing seem fun, harmless, innocent, two tipsy women dancing with each other and a boy for lack of a man to dance with. They turned off the lights, but they left the TV on, the volume turned down low but the screen conspicuously flickering, visible to anyone who might be watching from the street, walking or driving past 44. Medina would slide her hands up and down my mother’s back, sometimes lower, and I’d watch my mother hastily grab them away and whisper something urgent in her ear, after which Medina’s hands climbed back to where they’d been, one on my mother’s shoulder, one in her shoulder-high hand; my mother always led, one hand on Medina’s hip.

  It’s strange to think of your mother in bed with anyone, especially when you know your father hasn’t been to bed with her—or even seen her—in years. But it’s especially strange when you know that, just rooms away from yours, she sleeps with a man once a month and with a woman once a week—with the man for money, though the man in question convinces himself it might one day be for love, and with the woman for love that puts them in jeopardy of losing everything they have. How, being in love with a woman, could my mother stand to do it with a man? How could the man who knew the price that he was paying not sense or guess what her price was? It is also strange when you are a boy who has never really touched a girl except by accident, to know that on any given night such things might be going on behind the closed door of your mother’s room.