The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “She seems to visit quite a lot. Mr. MacDougal tells me it’s hard for him to hold your attention while she’s there. Would you mind if Percy went home so that we could speak more freely?”

  My mother sighed. “Go home, Perse. Tell Medina we’ll be there soon.”

  As I rose, Brother McHugh stopped pacing and again took my large hand, this time holding on when I tried to pull away. “I will be instructing you in religion—”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” my mother said. “His Grace agreed to that while the two of you were relaxing in the steam room.”

  “—and in your preparation for your baptism and the other sacraments. There is much for you to learn in a short amount of time.”

  I said, “Yes, Brother,” and he released my hand. I walked quickly to the chapel door and hurried across the road to 44, where, by the time I’d given Medina a full account of the meeting, she was unable to keep still. She went to the front window and looked across the street at Brother Rice. “He said that, Perse?” she said. “He said ‘Medina night’?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He must know, Perse, he must. Why else would he say ‘Medina night’? I’m here almost every night.”

  My mother and Pops arrived, Pops trailing behind her. My mother, Saint Joseph’s Daily Missal in one hand, kicked off her shoes, slamming them against the wall, and tossed her bandana on the floor.

  “Paynelope,” Pops said.

  “Shut up,” my mother said. She crossed the front room into the kitchen and smacked the missal on the table so hard that some of Medina’s beer spilled and foamed.

  “Percy should go to his room,” Pops said.

  “I decide when Percy should go to his room.” My mother sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. “McHugh objected to all my conditions of marriage, my stipulations as he somehow knew I call them, including the matter of how many times a month Pops should be allowed to fuck me.”

  “Paynelope,” Pops said. “Percy—”

  “Is none of your fucking business and has many times heard and said the word ‘fuck’ before.”

  “What happened, Pen?” Medina said.

  “I was lectured in a chapel against the use of contraception and the obligation of all married couples to contribute to the continuance of the human species.”

  “I’m going out,” Pops informed my mother. “I hope you’ll have cooled down by the time I return, which may not be for a while.” She said nothing and he slammed the front door behind him.

  “More children McHugh said I should have,” my mother fumed. She said she asked him if it was a rule of the Church that every woman had to have at least one child who was not a bastard.

  “But Pen—‘Medina night.’ Perse told me.”

  “Pops doesn’t know. I can tell. I’m less sure of McHugh. But once Pops and I are married, what could he do? They’d rather burn down the Vatican than annul a marriage. I think we’ll be all right if we’re careful.”

  “I don’t know,” Medina said. “All I know is that, if someone has to go, that someone will be me.”

  My mother took her hand, kissed her lightly on the lips and tugged on a curl of her hair.

  It was possible, McHugh had told my mother, who told Medina the next day, that there would be some radio, television and newspaper coverage of my baptism.

  Medina said it sounded as if they were planning a “big do” at the Basilica. She began to refer to it as “the Big Do at the Big B.” “Whereas the marriage of Pops and Pen,” she said, “won’t even make Wedding of the Week.”

  My mother pointed out that she would be making her first confession in fourteen, almost fifteen years, but I would only have to summarize the past eight years, seven being the age when, according to the Church, the capacity for guilt kicked in. In everyone. No exceptions. There was neither precocity nor backwardness where guilt was concerned. There were no delayed children who didn’t give a damn till they were eight. Seven was the age of guilt. You were ushered into it while dressed to the nines, your hair newly cut, ribbons pinned to you, proud parents bawling because they were so happy to witness you become suddenly and keenly aware of your innate malevolence and the evil that you harboured in your soul.

  When you turned seven, a lot of things that had never bothered your conscience began to bother it a lot. Thanks to your catechism instruction, you became aware that Satan is forever slyly at work in your mind, tempting you to perform such nefarious acts as withholding jelly beans from your friends or even misleading them about how many jelly beans you have. Formerly able to greedily relish your jelly beans in secret, you are now kept from doing so by consciousness of guilt, despite the many rationalizations for hoarding candy that the Evil One supplies you with. You think of the eons of immolation in Purgatory that your jelly bean dishonesty will get you if you leave it unconfessed. You hold out for as long as you can until, giving in to the Evil One’s exhortation that you gobble all your jelly beans at once, you are overwhelmed by guilt and a desire to return to the state of wholesome innocence you once inhabited, and you confess to a priest that your jelly bean assets are greater than you have led others to believe. You are forgiven, assigned penance and told to go and sin no more by a priest who is as certain that you will sin again as he is that your enjoyment of jelly beans will never be the same.

  And so it goes, my mother said. Satan shouts down or impersonates the voice of God and soon you cannot lift a finger, move a muscle, think a thought or say a word except at the behest of the indwelling, near-omnipotent demon whose existence, until a few days ago, you had somehow overlooked. At least, my mother said, I had had seven more years of lightheartedly breaking the commandments than she’d had, but I would soon be all too aware of how much coveting I did in the course of a day, of the impossibility of drawing an uncovetous breath.

  THE PARABLES OF PERCY AND PENELOPE

  “His Grace believes that the other students will learn a lot from the example that you set and that your mother sets.”

  Brother McHugh had told Brother Hogan to bring me to Hogan’s little office, which was hardly more than a closet, though I remembered it as the place from which McHugh had dragged me the day that he snapped me in the tunnel, and I wondered in fright if another snapping might be imminent. But it turned out that he really did just want to speak to me. He sat sideways to the desk as before, legs crossed, affecting disdain for his modest surroundings.

  “The Archbishop says your life stories are like parables. Your mother, as a younger woman, suffered great disappointment and betrayal, humiliation—in part because of her own premarital wrongdoing. Her fiancé left her when she was with child. Her child was born with a disfigurement that she foresaw would cause him and her great distress, the scorn of those who, never having truly suffered, would not understand the wounds that their cruelty inflicted. Your mother became bitter and turned away from God and from the Church. For fourteen years. Only by the humility and innocence of the very child who seemed to be at the root of her unhappiness did she come to realize her mistake, a realization that brought her back to God and the Church, by whose grace she was rewarded with the restoration of the very thing that years ago she had lost—a loving husband.

  “And you, Percy Joyce, your story, His Grace believes, is equally inspiring. A child is not only born out of wedlock to a mother who, because of trials that were devised to test her faith, has lost her way in the world, has become cynical, hardened and blind to the wonder of Creation, but he is born disfigured. He is encouraged by his mother to see only what is bad in others, but in spite of this, in spite of the persecution that he suffers because of his disfigurement and his shyness and his shame, he grows up to be a gentle, loving and forgiving child. With the help of wise, God-guided men of faith, he comes to see that, for him and his mother, the one and only path to true and full salvation is through the Church. The mark that hides your face is the outward sign of your inner gift, of the working within you of the Holy Spirit.

 
; “These are the two stories that His Grace believes will be told the day you are baptized and the day your mother is married. In each of these stories, a new and more glorious chapter will begin. That is what His Grace believes. It is not what I believe. I am not so easily fooled. I know snake oil when I smell it. Your mother rubs herself all over with it.”

  At home, my mother fretted about making her first confession in so many years. “ ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ve had amnesia since breakfast.’ Do you think that might work?”

  Pops said he didn’t think Father Bill or His Grace would let either one of us get away with a perfunctory, itemized confession.

  “Confessions aren’t supposed to sound like inventories,” Pops added, heading to the sunroom.

  “McHugh has told me to be open, sincere and entire. Or something like that. If I’m all those things with Father Bill, the odds of the wedding going ahead would not be good. The odds of the poor man’s life going ahead would not be good.”

  “Your odds wouldn’t be so good either.” Medina glanced toward Pops, who had settled in his chair in the sunroom. “What you say in confession is supposed to be a secret between you and the priest. But I’ve seen priests drag people out of that box and beat the daylights out of them.”

  My mother decided her best bet was to more or less recite the Archbishop’s parable. She would confess that being dumped while pregnant and engaged had made her bitter, her bitterness had caused her to turn her back on the Church, as had her child’s disfigurement. She would paint a portrait of a jaded, jilted woman who, for my entire life, had sought solace for the loss of Jim Joyce in the bottom of a beer glass.

  She said she expected a lecture on the sinfulness of, and consequent troubles that derived from, premarital sex. She would say that she constantly complained about the unfairness of her lot, her man-deficient existence, her miserable Jim-less, Joyce-less, joyless, empty life. She begrudged other women their husbands, wondered aloud why fate had sought her out but spared them. What had she done to deserve her manlessness? What had those other women done to deserve their lifelong man-mates? She had grown weary of asking God such questions and getting no reply. But she would also tell her confessor that she had emerged from the darkness of despair to discover that living in her house, almost since Jim Joyce had left, was the remedy for her misery—a man who surpassed in manliness the man who had rejected her and her child. And so she was about to begin her man-renewed, revived-by-man life, never more to stray from the Church, never more to be unmanned, never again to live in a husbandless house without a Church-sanctioned husband in the marriage bed beside her.

  Or nearby at least.

  She would say that now, almost fifteen years later, she was repentant because she knew that it was all part of God’s plan for her and her son, which was itself a tiny but inscrutably crucial part of His all-inclusive, universal plan by which all the atrocities of history would not only be redeemed but be seen as necessary. The parents of murdered children would see that, according to the plan, the murder of their children made perfect sense, there being no other way that an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God could think of to bring about the eternal harmony and happiness of others.

  I thought of my confession. It would be strange enough going into the confessional with an entire church full of students watching me, timing my confession, the whole Basilica so silent on my birthday they would, I fancied, be able to hear my every word or at least gauge the severity and complexity of my sins by the length of time I was holed up in the wall space, by the length of time it took me to finally spill my guts after all these years. It would be stranger still to be watched by all those students as I made my way to the altar rail to say my penance—which they would also time, and for the same reason.

  My mother said that in the confessional I should just assume the tone of my famous apology, repeat it word for word, and throw in some other disclosures that my confessor was already familiar with, such as my Vivian period, my Peeping Percy phase, my Francine phase, my bus-blessing, Pope-imitating phase, my ongoing “give me myth or give me death” campaign. “Pile it on,” she said. “There’s nothing Catholics like more than a reformed sinner—the worse the sinner, the greater the reformation.”

  McHugh reminded me that Catholicism was not a buffet from which you could pick and choose what you wanted to believe and ignore the rest. It was a prix fixe menu that allowed for no substitutes. This was especially true of the Catholic doctrine that he would teach me. He said I would also have to memorize, in preparation for my confession, not the condensed and simplified version of the Baltimore Catechism that my schoolmates had studied in grade two, but the much longer and complex version that was prescribed for those who made their First Communion as young adults.

  “His Grace has allowed me the use of a room in the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. This is a special privilege as there is no more appropriate place for a boy about to be baptized to study the catechism than a basilica named after the first and greatest of all Baptists. It is a privilege for which, one day, you will thank His Grace personally, even if your gratitude is insincere.”

  One afternoon when Pops was attending a teachers’ meeting, I returned home from school and found my mother and Medina kissing on the couch in the living room— kissing, not even with their arms around each other, but also not just pressing their lips together—rather having a slow, deep kiss that they didn’t pull out of when I walked into the room. I stayed silent but I had a curious feeling that they had wanted me to “catch” them, that they may have seen me coming down the hill and up the driveway. After about a minute, during which I watched, rapt, from the doorway, noting every movement of their mouths, I disguised my hard-on by sitting down. They pulled apart.

  “I was just kissing the bride,” Medina said.

  My mother said, “Guess what, Perse? Medina’s changed her mind. She’s going to be my maid of honour after all. I’ve already phoned McHugh and given him the good news.”

  “I’m sure he’s doing cartwheels,” Medina said.

  “How come you changed your mind, Medina?” I asked.

  Because she’d be jealous, she admitted, not only of Pops but of whoever was my mother’s maid of honour, and she wouldn’t be able to stand spending the wedding day alone in her room or wandering the streets in some other part of town. “I’m not going to enjoy it, but I think I’d like it even less if I wasn’t there.”

  “I’m so glad,” my mother said. “It won’t be as hard to pretend when everyone I’m pretending for is there.” I was surprised to see tears on her cheeks.

  Medina said we shouldn’t be surprised if, when Father Bill said, “You may kiss the bride,” she got to my mother before Pops did. “I feel sick when I think of Pops lifting that veil and planting one right on your lips.”

  “Well, it will be the first and last time he ever kisses me on the lips. There has been no real kissing during ‘visiting hours’ and there never will be. That’s always been a stipulation, as you know.”

  Medina said she would be bawling from the outset and she couldn’t guarantee that her tears would seem like tears of joy.

  “I might start bawling myself,” my mother added.

  Pops merely frowned when my mother told him Medina would be her maid of honour. “It’s your choice, Paynelope,” he said. He announced that the grade eleven history teacher at Brother Rice, a colleague of many years, had agreed to be his best man. “I really hardly know him,” Pops said. “McHugh asked him for me. And McHugh said he would do his best to find godparents for Percy.”

  “If a good confession is humble, sincere and entire, that means there hasn’t been one yet,” my mother told us.

  Nevertheless, she made her fourteen-years-delayed confession to Father Bill in the chapel confessional at Brother Rice. She said she paraphrased for Father Bill the Archbishop’s Parable of Penny Joyce, which Father Bill listened to wordlessly and seemed disappointed by, judging by the tone of his voice as
he assigned her penance. She described how Father Bill sat sideways to the wire mesh window to the other side of which her face was all but pressed, so that her lips were hardly more than an inch from his ear. She said that confession was like whispering to someone through a screen door in the darkness, asking the man on the other side to make you pure of heart and white of soul, even though you both knew that he couldn’t.

  “Have you ever been in the Basilica?” I asked her.

  She said that she hadn’t. She said that most rich Catholics, or those who wanted to be mistaken for rich, went to Mass at the Basilica, for the same reason that they shopped at the most expensive stores: to be seen by their rich fellows, to attend the highest-quality Mass that could be found in Newfoundland, Mass that did your soul more good than Mass at a mere church. At the Basilica, people believed, the sacraments counted for more. Better to confess to a bishop than to some hack priest who would botch the forgiveness of your sins and send you away in worse shape than you were before. Better to be baptized in the Basilica than in some church whose baptisms came without a warranty and might wear off at the worst possible time. Better to be married at the Basilica than at some discount church where grace of inferior quality was doled out like food at a homeless shelter.

  THE CATECHIST AND THE CATACHUMEN

  WHEN McHugh heard that I had never been inside the main part of the Basilica, he told me not to go in there before the day of my baptism. The first sight of the Basilica might help put even me in the proper state of awe and wonder to receive the sacraments.

  I had to study the answers to four hundred and twenty-one questions, as well as many prayers, hymns and the entire Mass. In the catechism for older students and adults, the official, unabridged Baltimore Catechism, there were fourteen hundred questions and answers, most of them much longer than in the abridged version. McHugh reluctantly decided there was not enough time for me to study the longest version. There were, however, among the four hundred and twenty-one questions in my catechism, Fifty Primary Questions that I would have to answer word for word on an exam because, he said, every one of the words was exactly the right word, chosen by the anonymous author of the catechism in 1885. As with the Ten Commandments, no other words, no synonyms or summaries would do, because the slightest departure of nuance or connotation could lead the student of the catechism into sin. There were no grey areas between right and wrong. The Truth was the Truth. The questions and answers in the Baltimore Catechism were channelled through the Infallible Pope by the Holy Spirit. They could not be argued with, qualified, modified or otherwise altered in any way or any context.