The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “Well,” she said, “if wishes were horses, women would ride.”

  I was well primed for a session of give me myth or give me death, my first in a long time. I told the other students—only minutes before joining McHugh in the Basilica that, according to my studies, the catechism stated that, if a mother and her son were stranded on a desert island, they were allowed to do it but only after waiting for seven years. In fact, the rule of the Church was that, after seven years, they had to do it. I said the mother had to be on top, always, or else it was incest. I said that after Jim Joyce left, my mother had sworn never to have sex again. I said that after she took one look at me, she swore she would never have sex again. Then I said my mother had told me that, if I hadn’t fucked a woman by the time I was twenty-one, she would let me fuck her. I said she was really looking forward to getting laid after all these years. But because she felt sorry for me, she let me see her tits sometimes, and once she let me touch one of them just so that I wouldn’t die not knowing what a naked tit felt like. Because she felt sorry for me, she let me see and touch any part of her I wanted to when we took baths together. But she wouldn’t let me do it to her or anything like that. She let me do anything except go all the way.

  I didn’t notice the reaction of the other students. I couldn’t swear I had an audience once I was through. My head was a buzzing, swarming tumult of salacious lies. I foresaw a day when I might myth myself to death.

  “So now we turn at last to you, Percy Joyce. Do you know what marriage banns are?” McHugh held the catechism as if he meant to throw it at me.

  “The priest announces at Mass on three Sundays in a row that a man and a woman of the parish are engaged and says that if anyone knows why these two people should not be married, they should tell the priest in private after Mass.” I liked to imagine them going up during Mass, whispering in the priest’s ear and pointing accusingly at members of the congregation.

  “Do you know of any reason why Penelope Joyce and Jerome MacDougal should not be married, Percy Joyce? Remember that it is a mortal sin to withhold such information from the priest or someone able to communicate it to him.”

  “I don’t know of any reason,” I said, but, unable to keep my voice from quavering, I swallowed with a gulp.

  McHugh laid his catechism face down on the table, then leaned on the table on his outspread hands, which brought his face closer to mine than it had ever been during our catechisms. “You don’t sound very sure of yourself. Is there something you would like me to pass on to His Grace? The eternals souls of Penelope and Jerome depend on this as well, as might those of other people if other people are involved. You must be certain.”

  “I am. I’m certain, Brother.”

  I thought he’d keep after me for hours, but he announced that this was our next-to-last meeting. The last would take place after the wedding and would consist of an exam on the Fifty Primary Questions.

  “Between now and then,” he said, “I want you to think very hard about the questions I asked you today.”

  “Only one more, sweetheart?” my mother exclaimed when I got home. “We should celebrate!”

  Some celebration. She and Medina drank beer in the kitchen and Pops drank in the sunroom. But they ordered out for pizza. My mother playfully said McHugh suspected Pops of having one or more secret wives in his past, women who were still alive and to whom he was therefore still married, divorce being forbidden to good Catholics such as he was. “Is he right? Is there a Mrs. VP MacD back in St. Anthony, Pops? A brood of kids, perhaps? Or are you even from St. Anthony, or Newfoundland for that matter? What town in what country did you hightail it out of years ago, and what did you run away from? Tell us all! A series of shotgun weddings, probably. Or a gambling debt? A posse of homicide detectives? You’re a man of mystery, many mysteries. Maybe you have other girlfriends, even fiancées that I don’t know about. Pops the secret rascal. We’re not related, are we, Pops? You’re not Jim Joyce’s first cousin, are you? This would be an awful time to tell me you’re the brother I never knew I had.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Pops said, smiling, dismissing her with a wave of his hand but clearly enjoying her tongue-in-cheek flirtation with him. He smiled almost sheepishly, as if it tickled him that my mother would, however jestingly, speculate about his darkly romantic past.

  Medina said sulkily that the only mystery about Pops was what the pair who were to blame for his existence could possibly be like and by what manner of mating their species reproduced.

  “What did your father do for a living, Pops?” my mother asked. “I might as well get to know you since we’re getting married.”

  Pops told her that his father had been a fisherman and his mother had earned money cleaning other people’s houses. But Medina said there was no way that Pops had ever been a child or that there had ever been an entire family of MacDougals.

  MacDoug-aliens was the best explanation for Pops, my mother said, suddenly switching sides because of how sullen Medina looked. “MacDoug-aliens from Planet Doug. What are people like on Doug?” My mother tipped back her head in laughter. “They probably all work in labs and wear white coats. A safety-goggle-wearing Pops-like race that lives primarily on beer.”

  Pops sighed with impatience. “Why do you let her influence you, Paynelope? Why can you not be as nice all the time as you are sometimes?”

  “Variety is the nice of life,” my mother said. “Besides, it’s so much more fun being mean than nice. You’d get bored with me if I was always nice.”

  “I would,” Medina said.

  “She is always nice to you,” Pops said.

  THE CHEMISTRY LAB

  MUCH later, unable to sleep, I went out to the kitchen for a glass of water. I saw that Pops was still in the sunroom. There were, I guessed, ten empty beer bottles beside his chair, but he was awake and talking as though to his reflection in the window. For the first time, it occurred to me that it could just as easily have been my mother and him that I had heard and seen in the bed that night. I was glad it hadn’t been.

  “What are you doing up this late, Percy?” he said. “Having dreams about the girls of Mercy? Tell Vivian to think of England.”

  “Thirsty,” I said. “Vivian’s gone.”

  “Here,” he said, “have some beer.” He laughed and drank from the bottle in his hand. I stood beside that old reclining chair of his.

  “I’ve had beer before,” I said. “Remember, when you and Mom got engaged—”

  He laughed again. “Do you think about little orphan girls from Belvedere playing with your jelly beans?”

  “I’m not afraid of girls.”

  “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be coming home from school every day with your pants put on backward by the girls of Holy Heart.”

  “If it wasn’t for Uncle Paddy and McHugh, you mean.”

  “Yes. You’re right. The albatross of 44, the albatross of Penny Joyce, is right.”

  “Mom doesn’t think of me as her albatross,” I said. But his words stung. Percy the albatross forever hung about his mother’s neck, weighing her down, a dead, leaden thing against which she would forever struggle in vain, forever have to lug around until she died.

  “Shouldn’t have said that, Percy. She loves you.”

  “Is something wrong, Pops?”

  “Is something wrong? Everything is wrong, Percy.”

  “But you and Mom are getting married soon.”

  Pops sniffed. “Married,” he said. “Don’t you think I know what that woman and your mother have been up to all these years? Don’t you think I know?”

  I was so frightened I started to cry.

  “Please don’t tell anyone, Pops.”

  “Who is there to tell? Everyone knows.”

  “No they don’t. Please, Pops. If anyone finds out they’re lizzies, they’ll take me away from Mom.”

  He slapped me across the face with the back of his hand. I fell, wound up palms flat on the floor, my hands gaining purchase just
in time to keep my face from hitting the carpet. I sat partway up, supported by my hands and feet, no longer crying.

  “That’s not true,” he whispered.

  “I saw her and Medina,” I said, unable to curb the spite his slap and the word “albatross” had stirred up in me. He stood, put his hands under my armpits, lifted me off my feet and all but threw me into his chair.

  “What lies are you telling about your mother, Percy?”

  Then, because he had hit me and thrown me into the chair, I realized that he’d been talking about something else—how my mother and Medina had been soaking him for money for so long. But I couldn’t stop myself now.

  “I saw them. Kissing. They had no clothes on and they were making noises. My mother loves Medina, not you. Doing it with you almost makes her puke. She loves to do it with Medina. I saw them in my mother’s room, in her bed—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true.”

  “What did you see?” He put his hands on the arms of the chair and brought his face to within an inch of mine.

  “I saw her and Medina. Doing it. Mom was doing it to Medina with her whole hand.”

  “Shut your filthy little mouth. What lies are you telling?”

  But his voice was a whisper now.

  “In my mother’s bed.”

  He raised his fist but slowly lowered it. And I saw by his eyes that, until I told him, he’d had no idea.

  “I was just kidding, Pops,” I said. “They’re not lizzies. I was just kidding. Because you hit me. And said I was an albatross.”

  “You know that’s not true,” he said, as if he was talking to himself. He was almost crying, his voice husky and weak. “Go to your room, Percy. Close the door, get into bed and go to sleep.”

  “Are you going to tell anyone?”

  “No. I’m not going to tell anyone. Are you? Are you going to tell your mother or Medina what you said to me?”

  “If you promise not to tell, I’ll promise not to tell.”

  “I promise, Percy. Believe me. I won’t say a word. Not another word. And you won’t say a word. No matter what happens. Right? For your mother’s sake.”

  I nodded. I scrambled out of Pops’ chair, ran to my room, shut the door, got in bed and ducked my head beneath the blankets. I lay there, my heart pounding, waiting for Pops to wake my mother, waiting for the shouting to begin. I waited for Pops to confront my mother, to walk right into her room so that she’d wake up to see him standing over her. I thought of how scared she’d be, and I hoped he wouldn’t hurt her. I wondered if I should phone Medina. And then wondered if, even now, Medina might be in my mother’s room, asleep in bed beside her. I wished I’d said nothing to him, felt so stupid for having misunderstood what he was about to say, for presuming to know, and not, as my mother would have done, waiting for him to speak.

  I waited and waited, but I heard nothing. I wondered if Pops had become so drunk he had fallen asleep in his chair, but I didn’t dare get up to see. I silently consulted with Saint Drogo. I stared at him as he peered out between the bars of his self-made cell. He was a cartoon-like depiction of deformity that, for the second time since I’d acquired the Mass card from Sister Mary Aggie, didn’t make me smile. The first time, the sight of him had made me punch the wall. But even this Quasimodo of a man had made his mark and been canonized, immortalized. The Patron Saint of Unattractive People. I thought of going to my mother’s room to tell her what had happened, what I had said to Pops, to tell her that, because of me, Pops knew and might tell McHugh. But the more I thought about it, the more certain I felt that he would never tell McHugh, never tell anyone, in part because he loved my mother and knew what the consequences would be for her and me, and in part because, like Jim Joyce, he wanted as few people as possible to know of his humiliation. If my mother and Medina knew that he had learned the truth about them and believed he might now or soon or sometime in the future tell McHugh, that would be the end of it, of him and Paynelope, of his life and all our lives at 44. With the truth out, we would have to run, my mother, Medina and I, run to God knows where, live as best we could after starting all over far from Newfoundland, an unlikely threesome of fugitives whom he would never see again.

  So I decided that, the best thing would be to say nothing to my mother, to wait and see what Pops would do next. I doubted he would wait long to speak with me again for fear that I would go to my mother. As I lay there on the bunk, I expected to hear the sound of my door being eased open, expected that, in whispers, Pops and I would soon be working out the terms of our silence, Pops impressing upon me what I already knew, the importance to all of us of me keeping my mouth shut.

  There wasn’t a sound, but I felt as if I’d been wakened by one after just a few minutes of sleep. Pops never used the back door, so I went to the front porch, to the vestibule, and looked out through one of the teardrop-shaped windows in the door. Though there was no street light nearby, I was just able to make him out, wearing his lab coat, slowly, slump-shouldered, trudging up the steps of Brother Rice. I wondered if he intended to wake McHugh in the middle of the night. The access tunnel from the school to the Brothers’ Quarters would be, as always, locked from the school side of the door. Pops could phone McHugh from somewhere in the school. Maybe he hadn’t used our phone because he didn’t want to risk waking me or my mother. Or maybe he had used it and was now on his way to see McHugh. But then I remembered that McHugh was the only one of the Brothers who had a private phone in the Quarters, and I doubted that Pops even knew the number; McHugh was always in his office when they spoke by phone. So what was he up to?

  He looked over his shoulder as a car went by. I ducked so he wouldn’t see me at the little window. When I looked again, he was not on the steps. The doors of Brother Rice were closed and no lights were on inside the school. I went back to my bedroom and watched from the window, hoping to see him leave the school, cross Bonaventure and come back home to 44. What a relief it would be to see him retrace his steps, hear him at the front door then scuffing through the house, kicking books aside as he always did on the way to his room.

  But there was no sign of him. I watched for perhaps fifteen minutes. I decided to go across the street myself and try to get into the school. For the sake of appearances, so as not to look absurdly conspicuous, I put on a jacket over my pyjamas and exchanged my slippers for a pair of boots. I crept from my room to the front door, all the while watching the door of my mother’s room, listening for the sound of her getting up or lighting a cigarette. I opened the inner door of the vestibule, closed it behind me, opened the outer door. There was not even the faintest glow of morning in the sky. Seeing no traffic the entire length of Bonaventure, I left the front yard and began to run across the street. The lights of a car that was far exceeding the speed limit appeared on the Curve of Bonaventure. I jumped onto the traffic island just in time to avoid the car, which didn’t brake, though someone in it, a young man, stared blankly at me.

  I watched the car until it dipped below the hill, then resumed my way across the street, running faster when I reached the walkway that led up to the lobby steps of Brother Rice. I tried the door. It swung open easily and I stepped inside. I was sweating and out of breath, and had to wait awhile until I was certain that the school was silent. There was a faint smell of cleaning liquid, but the marble floors were dry, so I assumed that the cleaners had long since left. I climbed the inner steps. The glass front wall of McHugh’s office was dark, though I could dimly make out the shapes of filing shelves and furniture inside.

  There was just a small window criss-crossed with wire in the door of the lab, but I faintly saw the dim glow of a single ceiling lamp inside. I pulled on the handle, and when the door didn’t open I thought it must be locked. Then I pushed and the door opened inward quite easily, barely making a sound. As the door swung to the right, I noted that the lab looked exactly as it had when Pops first took me there ten years ago.

  At the desk, in his lab coat, the coa
t and his face eerily white in contrast to the all but unlit lab, was Pops. Spread out on the desk in front of him were a small brown bottle made of glass that bore a skull and crossbones on the label, the black rubber stopper of the bottle, a beaker half full of what might have been milk, a tiny lab spoon. There was also a piece of paper with two pens laid on it as if to keep it in place. Pops sat there in the dark lab, his hands in the pockets of his coat, thumbs outside, hooked on the pockets.

  My mind raced, imagining what must have happened, Pops unlocking the door of the chemistry lab, closing it behind him and, without turning on the lights, making up his concoction, drinking it, sitting down at his desk on the dais, the blackboard behind him, the empty lab barely visible in front of him. How long had he sat there, overlooking the unmanned stations of the lab, goaded by my words into such a state of mind, picturing the scene I had described, the woman he thought of as his Penelope, his and no one else’s, not even Jim Joyce’s, in bed with Medina, Medina, the very person whom, above all others, he loathed, his unrelenting tormentor and detractor whom he had hoped, however foolishly, that he and Penelope were secretly in league against? How long had he sat there, wondering how it had come about that he had been undone by the words of a mere boy who knew what he had been too stupid, too self-absorbed, to surmise, the real secret of 44, the fact that he and not Medina was the butt of the ongoing joke of the house? If not for me, he might forever have persisted in his ignorance, might never have guessed the sort of cuckold the three of us knew him to be.

  “Pops,” I said, shaking his shoulder, praying that what I was witnessing for the first time was someone passed out drunk from drinking, praying for that even though his eyes were partway open, motionless, seemingly covered with glassy film, and only appeared to be looking at me. I ran my fingers through his hair, something I had never done before. It was sticky and smelled of lotion.

  “Pops,” I whispered, and began to cry.