The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “I’m not going to get down on one knee or anything. And there won’t be any visiting hours for Pops tonight. I promise.”

  “I still have to get baptized, don’t I?” I said.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Yes, you do.”

  “I don’t know,” Medina said. “One way or another, McHugh will sniff this out.”

  “I didn’t go to the East End Club again.” Pops closed the front door behind him, sounding as if he had come home with good news that would make us all feel better, as if his patronage of the East End Club were the main bone of contention at 44. “I went to the chem lab,” he said, announcing what might have been a bonus to his shunning of the East End Club. In his hands-but-for-thumbs-in-pockets pose, he walked in. I sat at the kitchen table where my mother and Medina were already seated, nervously smoking and nursing glasses of beer that were going flat.

  “Here he is,” Medina said, “dressed in wedding white.”

  Pops ignored her and, coming into the kitchen, headed straight for the fridge. Before he could grab the handle of the fridge door, my mother said, “Guess what, Pops.” Her face and throat scarlet red, as was her chest down to the first, ever-on-the-verge-of-popping button of her blouse, she said, “We’re getting married, you and me.”

  Pops smiled, opened the fridge door and took out a stubby brown bottle of Dominion Ale that he opened as always on the buckle of his belt.

  “Really,” Pops said. “What game have you two cooked up for me tonight?”

  Medina, looking at no one, said as if to herself, “It’s a game called, ‘Let’s see what Pops will fall for next.’ ”

  Pops nodded and turned to face the sunroom.

  “That’s it, Pops,” Medina taunted, stabbing out a cigarette among the many butts already in the ashtray. “Go to your little playroom like a good little boy.”

  “Enough, Medina,” my mother said.

  “There is nothing,” Pops observed, “that looks worse than lipstick on the filter of a cigarette.”

  My mother pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. “I mean it, Pops,” she said. “We’re getting married.”

  She removed Jim Joyce’s engagement ring and put it on the table. I’d half expected her to hand it to Medina. Pops stared at it.

  My mother forced a smile. “So, Pops, where’s that engagement ring you keep offering to me?”

  “It’s in the pocket of my lab coat,” Pops said. He patted his left pocket. “Please don’t play this joke on me in front of them.”

  My mother held out her left hand, ring finger extended. Pops glanced at me. He looked so dumbstruck I couldn’t help but smile, which seemed to reassure him. He reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a ball of wrapping paper, from which he removed a ring box covered in green velvet. He snapped it open and took out the sapphire ring, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. The hand that held the ring trembled.

  “I think you know the rest, Pops,” my mother said.

  Pops took two steps toward my mother then lowered himself to one knee.

  “Will you marry me, Paynelope?” he asked, sounding perplexed, as if he couldn’t believe the words had been prompted from him by her.

  Medina sniffed with derision. “It doesn’t count unless you say her name right.”

  “I will,” my mother said, her own hand and voice trembling as badly as Pops’. Pops managed to slide the ring onto her finger. Medina, sullen-faced, crossed her arms and shook her head at me in scornful disbelief.

  “There,” my mother all but gasped, “we’re engaged.”

  Pops, her hand still in his, stood up, his blue eyes blurred with tears. Her arms at her sides, my mother quickly leaned forward and pecked Pops on the cheek, then withdrew her hand from his and resumed her seat beside Medina.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Pops confessed. “One normally doesn’t get engaged—”

  “While wearing a grimy lab coat?” Medina said.

  My mother ever so gently brushed Medina’s arm with the back of her hand. Pops seemed not to notice.

  “It’s even more romantic in front of witnesses,” my mother said.

  “In front of strangers, yes.” Pops nodded. “Such as in a restaurant where everyone applauds if the surprised woman says yes.”

  “Well,” Medina said, “I’m so happy for you both it’s all I can do to keep breathing, let alone applaud.”

  “We’re going to be married?” Pops asked.

  “Yes,” my mother said, lighting up a cigarette.

  “When?”

  “Just before Percy gets baptized,” my mother said.

  Pops beamed at me as if I too had agreed to marry him.

  “I don’t understand,” he murmured. “Only the other day you were all, all of you, against doing anything. You were so upset with me, Paynelope, you poured a beer over my head.”

  “Drier heads prevailed,” Medina said.

  Pops had popped the question three times. Three times he must have opened that little velvet box with the engagement ring inside—three times, perhaps abruptly, without preamble—then said, “Paynelope, will you marry me?” looking up at her on bended knee or while lying in his bed beside her. Three times she had refused.

  “Today is a new day,” my mother exclaimed.

  “For me especially,” Medina said.

  “Not even you can spoil this moment.” Pops smiled at her.

  “Oh, I think I could if I really tried,” Medina said.

  “I have so much to say to you, Paynelope,” he declared.

  “I have far more things to say to you,” my mother said. “Have a seat at the table with us. I have a list of—let’s call them stipulations.”

  She told him of all the stipulations he would have to agree to unless he wanted her to be abandoned by yet another fiancé. Pops, drinking bottle after bottle of beer, agreed to everything, but looked all the more puzzled and dismayed. When my mother was through, Medina said, “Oh well, I guess bachelors can’t be choosers, Pops.”

  “We should celebrate or something, don’t you think?” Pops said. “If I’d have known, I would have bought champagne.”

  “We’re already celebrating,” my mother said. “And I think it’s time for Percy to have his first glass of beer to celebrate his upcoming baptism.”

  “Yes,” Pops said. “But we mustn’t tell McHugh we let him have some beer. He’ll be so pleased when he hears the news, mine and yours and Percy’s, Paynelope.”

  My mother poured me a half glass of beer. I almost gagged on the first mouthful. “Sip it slowly,” Pops said, then downed an entire bottle without a pause for breath.

  “A short engagement,” Pops said. “McHugh will be glad to hear that. His Grace, too. McHugh will be on the phone to him—Aren’t you going to congratulate us, Medina?”

  “Sure, Pops,” Medina said, raising her glass. “Here’s to you, Pen, McHugh and Uncle Paddy. And Sir Percival the Merciful, of course. I hope the five of you will be very happy.”

  “Why must you always be so sour?” he asked.

  “It’s been a very long day for me, Pops.”

  “Well, perhaps now you’ll get married.”

  “I haven’t been preventing her from getting married,” my mother said, closely watching his reaction.

  “You wouldn’t see me so often then, Pops,” Medina pointed out. “Wouldn’t you miss me?”

  “Like a toothache.”

  My mother looked relieved.

  “Paynelope, you’ve set some draconian stipulations for our marriage. Are they completely non-negotiable?”

  “Completely,” my mother said.

  “Well,” Pops admitted, “I’ve never really wanted children of my own. No offence, Percy. And I’ve come to think of Medina as a fact of life. But separate rooms? Separate beds? And the visiting privileges seem”—he glanced at me—“well, they seem like visiting privileges. Like you’re behind bars. Or I am.”

  “Don’t look a gift wife in the mouth,
Pops,” Medina said.

  “You’re getting a bit tipsy, Pops,” my mother said. “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “I’m not tipsy,” Pops corrected her. “I’m good and drunk. It’s not every day I get engaged. That ring looks quite becoming on your finger. It’s Percy who should go to bed, and Medina should go home. Then we could have a proper celebration, you and me.”

  “Go to bed, Pops,” my mother said, looking uneasily at Medina. My mother stood, took him under the arm, got him to his feet and led him to his bedroom door.

  “Tuck me in?” Pops said. “After we’re married, I’ll carry you across the threshold,” he said, flinging out one arm in a triumphant flourish.

  “Off to bed, there you go.”

  “No good night kiss, my darling fiancée?”

  My mother kissed him on the cheek, gently pushed him inside and closed the door. She sat at the table again and flashed Medina a mischievous, conspiratorial smile that Medina ignored.

  “He’ll soon see that nothing has changed,” my mother said.

  “Nothing will have changed except that he’ll be married to you. His dream come true. Till death do you part.”

  “I’m not looking forward to the first time someone calls me Mrs. Jerome MacDougal. It will be as if both my names have simply disappeared.”

  “You and me, Perse,” Medina said, “we’ll be the last of the Joyces until you have children of your own.” She looked instantly as if she wished she hadn’t said it. I decided not to make her feel worse by estimating the chances of my ever having children.

  Medina complained that many of the things that my mother had excluded Pops from for fear of giving people the wrong impression would now be things that people would expect Pops to take part in. She could just see it now, the Triple P family, Penny, Pops and Percy, strolling to Marty’s for ice cream sodas after Mass on Sunday or to a movie at the Capitol on Henry Street, Pops with his wife and stepson, wholesome pillars of the community whom people would regard as proof that, in the end, things could work out for the best for everyone, even abandoned, pregnant fiancées, disfigured children and lonely bachelors.

  “Maybe it’s just as well that you and Pops are getting married,” she said. “I’ll no longer have to think of Pops and I as having the same girlfriend. You’ll be his wife. I’ll be the woman you’re having an affair with. And everyone knows that having an affair is more fun than being married. Especially if the affair never ends.”

  “It won’t,” my mother said.

  “If you’ve already made up your mind, Pen, you should tell me now,” Medina insisted. “I wouldn’t blame you for putting Percy ahead of me, but I’ll blame you if you lead me along until I get the point just because you haven’t got it in you to send me away or because you want to make it seem that I’m the one who ended it.”

  She started to cry. My mother let go of me and motioned with her head that I should go to my room.

  THE INSTRUCTION OF PENELOPE

  AT McHugh’s request, my mother, Pops and I went to visit McHugh in Brother Rice one evening after dinner in late May. McHugh told Pops we should come to the chapel instead of to his office. There would be no one else there, he said, because he had told the other Brothers that it would be occupied.

  McHugh was sitting in one of the two front pews when we went inside, the one just to the left of the aisle that was in line with the tabernacle. The chapel was so dimly lit, mostly by two banks of votive candles flanking the altar, that I couldn’t see more than a few pews past McHugh.

  McHugh rose and smiled. He held out his hand to me and squeezed it firmly when I took it.

  “God bless you, Percy,” he said. “Baptism is the first and greatest of the seven sacraments.”

  “Thank you, Brother,” I said, as if baptism’s primacy and greatness were solely my doing.

  McHugh next took my mother’s hand. “Congratulations, Miss Joyce. I have been praying that you would accept Vice-Principal MacDougal as your husband. He had begun to lose hope. It is wise for a woman not to lightly give up her body, heart and soul to another, but you did have the two of us worried for a while.”

  He laughed and looked at Pops, who, incongruously attired in his lab coat, smiled as if he was casting back with ironic fondness to the days of disappointment through which nothing but the encouragement of a close friend had sustained him, days whose happy end McHugh alone had been able to foresee.

  “I don’t feel as though I have given up anything,” my mother said. “Nor did I realize until recently that you and my husband-to-be were such close confidants. By the way, it was I who proposed.”

  “Mr. MacDougal told me,” McHugh countered, “that you did not quite do that. You simply informed him that you and he were getting married, at which point he proposed, asked for your hand in marriage on bended knee just as he had done three times before. But this time you said yes.”

  “There doesn’t appear to be much that Mr. MacDougal doesn’t tell you.”

  “I have no way of knowing what he doesn’t tell me,” said McHugh.

  My mother sat in the front pew and I sat beside her. Pops remained standing until McHugh motioned for him to join us, at which he sat beside my mother. McHugh clasped his hands behind his back and, looking at the floor, frock slightly swishing, began to pace back and forth in front of us, between us and the altar rail. He spoke in a voice that was gentle, serene, modulated, as if he wished to leave the silence of the empty chapel undisturbed, as if every word he was saying was part of some official clerical instruction to those about to begin or resume their lives in the Church.

  “I asked you to come here this evening so that I could speak about a few things that still somewhat trouble me.” He smiled and continued pacing as if savouring what he was about to say. “I have news. Father Bill will perform the marriage right here, in the chapel. A week before Percy is baptized. His baptism, as you know, will take place June 24, a Saturday. Percy’s birthday. As always on that day, the Feast of Saint John the Baptist will be celebrated, as will the Basilica itself, and the city of St. John’s as well. Your baptism, Percy, will be the least of the reasons for the great celebration that will occur that day.

  “His Grace will administer all three of the sacraments on the same day to Percy in the Basilica. Father Bill is going to hear your confession, Miss Joyce. You will have to go to Confession and Communion before you can be married. The Church, you see, has some stipulations of its own. You will be required to take these sacraments seriously, to make a full and sincere confession before you take Holy Communion. You must confess to what the Church deems to be a sin, not just to what you deem to be one. I believe it’s been quite some time since you went to Confession, hasn’t it?”

  “I stopped going just after Percy was born. Don’t assume cause and effect.”

  “By the way, His Grace wishes that Percy’s Baptism, Confession and Communion be witnessed by as many students of the Mount as possible. And bishops and priests from all over the island will attend and take part—not for Percy, of course, but as I said, for the usual celebration of the Basilica. For reasons that elude me, Percy has for years been a favourite of His Grace, and his long-delayed induction into the Church is, His Grace believes, an important event for all of us. But His Grace does not want to dilute the momentousness of Percy’s big day by combining it with yours. Otherwise, you’d have been married in the Basilica immediately before Percy was baptized.”

  “Pops—” my mother said, but McHugh interrupted her.

  “That is also one of the things I wish to discuss. I’m hoping that, once you are married, you won’t go on using the students’ nickname for Mr. MacDougal. It seems—disrespectful, frivolous, even demeaning. Mr. MacDougal shares the Christian name of one of the great Doctors of the Church, a name that your son has decided to take as his baptismal name—”

  “Pops is Pops,” my mother said. “He has been for a very long time. He is not Jerome. Not to us.”

  “You’ll think about
it?”

  “Only when I’m in need of a good giggle.”

  “Then there is the question of children.”

  “There is no question. We won’t be having any.”

  “None?”

  “I have a child.”

  “You had him outside of wedlock.”

  “He will soon be inside wedlock. Soon, all three of us will be wedlocked.”

  “Mr. MacDougal has no children. Nor, he tells me, will he have any say in how Percy is raised.”

  “What did you do, Pops, give him a written list of my stipulations?”

  “Is your concern that another child of yours might be born with a disfigurement like Percy’s?”

  “It never crossed my mind.”

  “In the eyes of God, Percy is beautiful.”

  “As he is in mine.”

  “I have a gift for you, Miss Joyce.” McHugh held out to my mother a small but thick black book. “This is a new copy of Saint Joseph’s Daily Missal.” He opened it near the beginning. “You see, it says ‘This missal belongs to …’ I’ve written in your marriage name, Penelope MacDougal.” He closed the book and again held it out to my mother, who grabbed it from him as if she meant to throw it aside.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”

  “Saint Joseph is the Patron Saint of the Universal Church.”

  My mother held the missal in one hand at her side.

  “How can you be certain that you won’t have another child, Miss Joyce? Need I remind you that any unnatural form of prevention is deemed by the Church to be a sin?”

  “I think it’s time the three of us went home,” my mother said.

  McHugh, now pacing faster back and forth in front of the altar rail, said, “Just a couple more points. For Percy’s sake, I’ll use the euphemism which Mr. MacDougal tells me you used: separate rooms and ‘visiting hours.’ ”

  My mother laughed, not mirthfully.

  “Is there anyone in your home at the moment?” McHugh said.

  “Medina is there,” my mother said.

  “Is it Medina night again so soon?”

  “What do you mean by that?”