The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “They want him to be gifted and blend in?” my mother said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “A gifted person should not exalt himself above others,” Brother McHugh replied. “After all, his gift comes not from himself but from God.”

  “Well, Percy is really not much of an exalter. I hardly ever catch him exalting anymore.”

  “There’s no need to speak like that to Brother McHugh, Paynelope.”

  “Don’t worry, Vice-Principal MacDougal, I’ve faced bigger challenges than Miss Joyce before.”

  My mother put her hand on my back. “Come on, Percy.” She turned one last time to McHugh. “Don’t you think that a God who gets the credit should also get the blame?” I knew she was speaking of my face, but I didn’t mind.

  As we found and slid into a pew, I watched Brother McHugh. His demeanour was one of exaggerated piety and gentleness. He moved about very slowly, his hands joined palm to palm in front of himself, nodding slightly, deferentially, whenever he caught someone’s eye. His chapel voice was low but sonorous, intelligible from a distance, a voice that somehow matched the early morning sunshine that obliquely slanted through the stained glass windows and the hushed sounds of congregants who, somehow both bored and expectant, made their way to their usual numbered stations in the pews.

  Brother McHugh’s demeanour may have been deferential, but the other Brothers deferred to him as he walked about, making way for him, groups of them parting to let him pass slowly among them. He was not the tallest or largest of the Brothers or the most fit and solid-looking of them; that prize went to a square-shouldered and square-jawed Brother with thick, black-framed glasses that magnified his eyes. He had the most prominent and volatile Adam’s apple I had ever seen. I half expected it to pop out of his mouth. McHugh looked effeminate by comparison, forever brushing back his white hair with one hand, shaking his head slightly from side to side as if to rid his face of some imaginary fly, a little wattle of fat quivering beneath his chin. A small wooden crucifix hung from a black belt around his waist, but he was otherwise unadorned.

  About half of the schools on the Mount didn’t front onto Bonaventure, so many of the Brothers and lay teachers who attended chapel Mass had never seen me before. They recognized me instantly, of course, by what I heard one of them, in a whisper, call my funny-coloured face and oversized, sagging lip. “That’s the boy with the funny-coloured face,” a man said, as if the woman beside him couldn’t see as much with her own eyes. Why, said the expressions of the lay teachers, some of whose own children went to Brother Rice or St. Bon’s, should the only Limbo-bound/freak/father-deserted student on the Mount, an oddball triple threat, also be the only boy who didn’t have to prove himself in any way, didn’t have to get by on his toughness or his wits or his good looks or his athletic prowess, the only boy who got an Uncle Paddy–conferred free pass through the prolonged boot camp known as “school” and the proving ground for Heaven known as “life”?

  Before Mass began, I watched people going into and emerging from the confessional. They looked, stepping out, as if they’d been hiding in the wall. There were a few other children, including some lower school girls, dressed as though for their own birthday parties in frilly dresses and white tights and gleaming black, silver-buckled shoes.

  “What’s going to confession like?” I said.

  “It’s not for claustrophobics,” my mother whispered. “Especially not for claustrophobic priests.”

  “What do you do?”

  “You pretend to tell the priest your sins. Most people recite a list of made-up minor ones. The priest forgives you for doing things he knows you never did. When you come out, you go up to the altar rail and pretend to say your penance—the prayers he instructed you to say, the number of times he instructed you to say them.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “Always.”

  Father Bill Slattery, the priest who had blessed our house, said Mass when he was finished hearing confessions. I was surprised to see him step out of the wall space as if he too had been hiding in there.

  Brother McHugh sat alone at the aisle end of the left front pew. Each time Father Bill made us sit or kneel, Brother McHugh turned around slightly and smiled, seemingly instructing us to do as he was about to do, not so much superfluously translating for us the priest’s command as making it seem to come from him, as if we needed extra instruction because, in spite of Vatican II, Father Bill still said Mass with his back to the congregation and his gaze on the tabernacle. I imagined McHugh standing at his window in the darkness late at night, looking out at the world that he was set apart from, could no longer consort with as he once had and so many other men he had known still did. His suite, his office, this little chapel, the tunnels, the Basilica, the stations of his life, a tiny, nameless constellation in the night sky of the world.

  I had never been inside a church before. I paid close attention to everything—Father Bill in his gleaming, heavy-looking vestments, the many glittering, ornate vessels, the crystal cruets of water and wine, the Biblical scenes depicted in the stations of the cross that lined the walls and the ones in the intervening stained glass windows, the incense-puffing thurible that hung from chains that clinked like pocket change, the set of four angelus bells that one of the altar boys rang, making them sound like the advance of a colony of lepers. Father Bill said the Mass in Latin, again in spite of Vatican II, and might as well have given the sermon in the same language for all the attention it was paid. I ignored every word of it in favour of looking about at people who I thought were spellbound until I saw that most of them were fighting to keep from nodding off to the singsong sound of Father Bill’s high-pitched voice, a voice that would not have been taken seriously if it had emanated from an executioner. I had seen crucifixes before, at school, in McHugh’s suite, but none as graphically coloured and detailed as the one behind the tabernacle, which my mother said was a kind of “oven” where the Communion wafers, the Holy Hosts, were kept.

  The most appealing thing I saw was the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary recessed in the wall on the outer right-hand corner of the altar, the counterpart to one of Christ on the left-hand side whose weirdly glowing Sacred Heart was like the one I’d seen years ago in Sister Mary Aggie’s window. Mary, alone of all the people in any way depicted in the chapel, looked serene in spite of the gasping serpent she was crushing with her foot. “A virgin with her foot on the head of a snake,” my mother whispered. “I wonder what that’s meant to symbolize, Perse.”

  On the way out, Pops dipped his hand into a holy water font just inside the door and blessed himself.

  “So what did you think, Perse?” my mother said. What I thought was that, so far, it was fun to have done once and might be fun again a year from now, the way it was fun to go to the circus on its annual stop in St. John’s. But all I did was shrug as if to say I didn’t see what the fuss was about.

  “He didn’t understand any of it,” Pops said.

  “I should have taught him Latin.”

  “You should not have spoken to McHugh like that,” Pops whispered. “He’s done a lot for Percy.”

  “And for you. He lets you board in a heretic’s house as long as the heretic goes to Mass. Good thing for you that I agreed to go.”

  “You mean good thing for you,” Pops said. “An abandoned woman with a child could find herself in worse circumstances than yours.”

  At Pops’ after-Mass breakfast, my mother all but dropped a plate of food on the table in front of him.

  “Big plans for tonight, Miss Joyce?” Pops said. “Two or three men lined up as usual? Maybe if you learned to cook, you could find a man.” He grinned.

  “Don’t be too smug, Pops. A man never knows what might be in his food.”

  Pops smiled at me. “I’m just pulling your mother’s leg,” he said.

  “My leg isn’t yours to pull,” she retorted.

  From then on, once a week, my mother was Pops’ “captive date,” a
s she put it. “He thinks I’ll relapse by long-term exposure to Catholicism,” my mother said. Or else, she said, McHugh had directed Pops to try to wear her down. “McHugh’s missionary,” she called him, saying that Pops’ comportment, his “humbly holy look,” in Mass almost had her fooled. My mother said you only had to look at the world to see that no one was running it. Pops said that his disbelief in God was based on science. He said that my mother and Medina couldn’t be bothered to give the question of God enough thought to find out if they believed in Him.

  Medina kept going to Mass with us, forgoing her usual church on Patrick Street, spoiling what my mother called Pops and McHugh’s “fantasy pageant.” My mother and I would watch as Medina and Pops made their way to the altar and joined the others kneeling at the rail for Communion, often having no choice but to kneel side by side, looking almost like a married couple. Because of the angle to the altar at which we sat, I was able to see some people sticking out their tongues. Everyone’s tongue was a different size and shape, but all of them were wet and all of them quivered as though they were terrified of something. I saw Pops, hands folded on the rail, eyes closed, mouth open, his purple tongue hanging out as if he were presenting it for examination by a specialist. Medina barely extended hers and didn’t close her eyes. It looked as if the entire congregation had come out to have their tongues inspected by the priest, as if he could tell by their tongues what they’d been up to since last Sunday.

  Pops and Medina would come back from the altar and kneel in our pew, Pops with his head bowed and eyes closed, his mouth closed but barely moving as he chewed the Host—the very picture of fervent piety and unassailable faith. Medina would kneel briefly, then sit down.

  “Pops, you’re such a hypocrite,” my mother would say later, each time laughing until she had to bend over and put her hands on her knees.

  “I’m merely doing what I must,” Pops said. “At a word from that priest, I could lose my job.”

  “One more look at that tongue of yours,” Medina said, “and I could lose my breakfast.”

  I’ve no doubt that to people who didn’t know us, Medina was the odd one out, appended to a complete family like the maiden aunt she was. No doubt they mistook Pops for my mother’s husband and my father unless they noticed that he wore no wedding ring. My mother always wore her engagement ring in public as she did at home, sometimes rubbed it in the chapel when she talked about Jim Joyce. We always sat in the same order in the pew. From left to right: Pops, Medina, me, my mother.

  “I feel sorry for the priest,” my mother said, “but it’s hard to join in with someone when they’re standing back on to you and singing like that in a language that no one else can understand.”

  “One can disbelieve in something and not stoop to mocking it, Paynelope.”

  I asked Pops what the Holy Host tasted like.

  “Like paper and glue,” Pops said. “Like taking a bite of an envelope that someone else just licked.”

  The altar boys didn’t look embarrassed in spite of what they wore. They had plaid slippers like the ones I had at home, but the priest had shiny black boots like the ones sailors wore. Pops said the boys’ frilly, ruffled white blouses were called surplices and the red dresses they wore underneath were called soutanes. He sighed.

  “Your mother’s right. It’s all a lot of flim-flam. Hocus-pocus, smoke and mirrors. Don’t ask me any more about it.”

  I recognized the Brother Rice boys—they were some of the grade elevens who during the week stopped traffic on Bonaventure, sauntering across the street in their maroon blazers and grey slacks as if they owned the very pavement they were walking on.

  “You should see the way McHugh looks at you,” Medina said to my mother. “He must have picked it up from Perse.”

  Nowhere did I sit so close to my mother for as long as I did at Mass. The pews of the small chapel were snugly full each Sunday, bodies pressed to bodies, strangers, mere acquaintances at best, pressed shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, everyone squeezing their knees tightly together to make room. My mother on one side of me, Medina on the other, the two of them separated by nothing more than me, the three of us, where we touched, faintly damp with sweat, my mother’s and Medina’s scents mixed with mine, and even, to some degree, with that of Pops, away from whom—and therefore into me—Medina leaned as much as she could, which gave me an excuse to lean even more into my mother than I had to. When we knelt or sat, or rose to stand, my mother’s right breast was often squashed against my shoulder, firm, barely yielding. When we sat, her skirt hiked up above her knees so far that when she crossed her legs, she overexposed one leg instead of merely baring the lower halves of both. I was glad I didn’t have to leave the pew, glad that neither she nor I went up to the altar for Communion, for what I had could be hidden by nothing less than the Catholic Book of Worship, in spite of which, I felt certain, my mother saw the bulge in my school slacks and knew the reason for it—not that I minded that she saw it or that she knew she inspired it.

  ST. JOHN’S DAY, JUNE 24

  JUNE 24. My fourteenth birthday. I hitched a ride to the top of Signal Hill in the back of a pickup truck, in the cab of which rode a man, his wife and their little girl, who kept alternately scowling and smiling at me from the small back window, pulling her mouth into shapes in an effort to look like me. As we passed the site of the picnic my mother, Medina and I had had there, I thought of what we had said and had not spoken as openly of since. That day we had been hemmed in by fog and rock, but this day was cool, clear and windy.

  There were many other people on the hill, most of them gazing out to sea on this rare day of perfect visibility, shielding their eyes from the sun with one hand to get a better look and holding their coats together at the throat with the other, their hair and scarves blown back horizontal by the wind. Some children and even a few grown-ups whom I had never set eyes on before said, “Hi Percy,” and I nodded to them.

  Even people who live by it are spellbound by the sea, gape at it in the morning as if it wasn’t there the night before. What a curiously urbanized people we were, I thought, gazing in wonder at the sea as if word of it had been spreading since the sun came up, rumours of a great tract of water by which we would henceforth be separated from the main. We stared as, in 1905, our ancestors had stared at the towering iceberg uncannily shaped like the Virgin Mary that had floated by on this very day, the feast day of the Baptist. Late in the season for an iceberg and therefore all the more miraculous. The Ice Queen of Heaven. The Virgin Berg. Our Lady of the Frigid Fjords.

  Like me, these people knew nothing of boats, of ocean navigation, of fishing except the kind you could do while standing knee-deep in a pond. They saw the weather as nothing more than an unrelenting nuisance. They didn’t understand the inextricable connectedness of wind and water. In many ways, we were almost as urban as the people of Lower Manhattan. Islanders living right on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean—without at least an hour’s notice they could not have said from which direction the wind was blowing or what the implications of that information would have been for the weather forecast.

  Yeats had heard the “sea-wind scream upon the tower.” My mother had several times read to me his “prayer” for his daughter: that she not be granted beauty overmuch … lest she consider beauty a sufficient end … and never find a friend. What was my mother trying to tell me—that it might be for the best that I was “not granted beauty overmuch”? Self-infatuation, the curse of beauty. Not quite the same as that of ugliness. Or that no one knew better than she did what to live with “beauty overmuch” was like? I imagined her waking up one morning to find her face stained, her hands and feet both stained and doubled in size. How much solace would she have found in the poetry of Yeats? A Prayer for Penelope. A Prayer for My Son.

  But I wouldn’t have minded the company of a girl who, from having been granted beauty overmuch, was so shallow as to want nothing from others but adulation—it would be fine with me. Throw me your
bone and I’ll throw you mine. Does that seem crude and pathetic? Very well, then, I was crude and pathetic, and in that way, if in few others, typical of teenage boys. I’m trying to distinguish between lust and love lust. I have lusted, unrequited, after hundreds, but I have love-lusted after no one but my mother. Would this have been the case but for my FSS? Who knows?

  There are many things that, barring apocalypse, will always be taboo: murder, rape, molestation, tyranny and torture. And so on. Of taboos, mine is not the first, much less the last. It is anomalous, not typical, even as taboos go. There’s no point in asking if it’s right or wrong. It happens by the confluence of circumstances, every one of which is unlikely, and that very confluence beggars belief. Just remember, I’m the one who said my mother was a prostitute for sleeping with the man who kept a roof above my head. I am not some sexual iconoclast. My case is just a tad more hopeless than that of the few among us who have truly been in love. My story is not an alibi, not a euphemistic closing argument in defence of breaking what many people call the worst taboo.

  Standing on Signal Hill, I found I could look down at the ruins of the old smallpox sanatorium, beyond which the lone and level sea stretched far away. It was easy to imagine that there was no far shore, that all of us had come to the top of the hill as though to the edge of a never-ending universe of water, the origin of all four winds, the realm of Aeolus. Guglielmo Marconi, second only to Ben Franklin among the famed flyers of kites, gave Signal Hill its name when he flew his kite, antenna attached, from the top of the hill, and claimed to hear, in Morse code, the letter S sent by wireless telegraph from Clifden, Ireland—supposedly the first transatlantic telegraph transmission. Marconi’s claim was contested by Thomas Edison, who called him a hoaxster, but Marconi stuck to his story. His credibility was somewhat weakened years later when he became one of Italy’s most decorated pre-war Fascists, honoured by Benito Mussolini agreeing to be the best man at his wedding.