The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  It was strange to think of it, the three of us feeding off her beauty, each of us taking our turn when the other two were unaware. If she didn’t tell Medina, ours would be the secret affair, our affair, unknown to others, unmocked and unbegrudged by others, the only truly illicit affair of 44. I wondered if, once we began, I would become envious of Pops and Medina, so much more envious than I had ever been that I couldn’t stand it. I had worn her down as surely as McHugh and Pops had worn her down, as surely as Uncle Paddy had.

  ST. JOHN’S DAY, JUNE 24: THE BIG DO AT THE BIG B

  MY mother pinned on me or hung around my neck all the holy medals, “talismans” she called them, that she and Medina could find, most of them left over from my mother’s school days and not worn since, medals of Saint Anne, scapular medals, the dog tag–like pair of Confirmation medals she had worn but once in her life when she was twelve and had never known the meaning of.

  “He can’t wear those,” Medina said. “He hasn’t been confirmed.”

  “I’ll put them inside his clothes then,” my mother replied. “You never know. They might help in some way. We’re fighting fire with fire.”

  She fixed light blue Blessed Virgin Mary ribbons to the sleeves of my blazer and red Sacred Heart ribbons to my lapels, prompting Pops to protest that I was not a Christmas tree and Medina to observe that Pops was not my father.

  My hair had been shaven the day before to brush-cut length—the stain on my scalp showed through far more than usual. McHugh was not able to find what he called “willing and suitable” godparents for me in time for my baptism but said that, sometime in the near future, he would find two people and they would be installed by Father Bill in a private ceremony at the chapel.

  McHugh decided that, to make sure we were on time and I was presentable no matter what the weather, a car would be sent to 44 to take the four of us to the Basilica. Two hours before the service was to begin, a black limousine drew up outside 44. It was driven by a deacon, one of the newfangled married kind, though he was dressed in black and said not a word from the time he opened the car doors to let us in to the time he opened them to let us out. Pops sat in front with him and wondered aloud why Medina was willing to ride in this car but not in any others.

  “It’s an experiment to see if I can keep from getting sick,” Medina said.

  “Not exactly the perfect time for that experiment,” Pops said, looking worriedly at me as I sat between my mother and Medina.

  “Don’t get accustomed to going to church in this style, Perse,” my mother said. “There’ll only ever be one Big Do at the Big B.”

  People were already entering the basilica parking lot through what was known as St. John’s Arch, a small Roman archway. We were met there by a trim, white-haired, anxious-seeming priest I didn’t recognize. He introduced himself to us as Father Hamlyn, “one of the pastoral assistants to His Grace.” Scurrying ahead, he had us follow him to a side door by the main entrance. It led to a waiting room where he left us and told us not to budge until he came back. The room was ringed with dark green leather sofas. A massive, expansive coffee table stood on an oval rug in the middle of the room. The walls, the same colour as the sofas, were cluttered with drawings and photographs of the various stages of construction of the Basilica.

  “How did we end up here, Pen?” Medina whispered, suddenly starting to cry.

  “Everything’s fine,” my mother said. “It’s just a necessary bit of fraternizing with the enemy. But the walls may have ears and eyes, so be careful. How are you doing, Perse? Nervous?” I nodded. I could hear my stomach rumbling, in part from hunger because, having fasted for Holy Communion, I’d had nothing to eat since midnight—almost fourteen hours ago—and in part from dread of what I knew was waiting for me.

  “There’s no need to think of anyone as the enemy,” Pops said to me. “Being baptized will do you no harm even if you decide someday that you don’t believe in it.”

  “Baptism can’t be annulled, can it?” my mother asked, looking at me as though at an expert in such matters.

  I shrugged.

  “Excommunication is the only way, I think,” Pops said.

  I realized, when I heard the tramping of footsteps overhead, that we were just beneath the main floor. Judging by the sheer number of footsteps, the students were filing in to fill the pews of the Basilica. I had never heard such a prolonged silence from so many students of the Mount. I would have liked to see them, solemn-faced, not even whispering as, watched over by the Brothers and the nuns, guided by them to various parts of the Basilica, they shuffled along self-consciously in the echoing vault of the great cathedral that I had yet to see.

  “It sounds like the whole city was invited,” Medina said, as if the size of the congregation held some sinister implications for the three of us.

  “There aren’t going to be many parishioners,” my mother said. “Just some of the more prominent ones, bigwigs who couldn’t stand to be excluded from something called the Big Do at the Big B. I saw a television van out front.”

  Under the scrutiny of so many skeptical students, who would surely not be fooled by a display of piety from anyone, under the gaze of McHugh and Sister Celestine, under the glare of television lights and the all-recording eye of the camera, how would I get away with it? As if I had posed the question out loud, my mother said, “We wouldn’t have got this far if they could read our minds.”

  Pops looked about to object, but my mother raised her finger to him. “No more stepfatherly advice from you,” she said. “For your money and your ring, you get me once a month. You do not get a say in how Percy should be raised.”

  “The walls have eyes and ears, remember?” Pops said.

  The sound of footsteps from above abated gradually, giving way to sporadic, nervous coughs that rang out in the silence of the church like rifle shots.

  “The balconies must be full,” my mother said, just as the pipe organ started up, music blaring from it at such a volume that everything in the room began to shake.

  “It’s like an earthquake,” Medina said, plugging her ears with her fingers. A choir that sounded as if it numbered in the hundreds began to sing “Come, Holy Ghost, Creator Blest.”

  Father Hamlyn returned with warm, just-printed programmes for the three of us. “Let’s go over this,” he said. “It’s short and sweet. A lot is left out because we didn’t want to confuse Percy.” He looked at me and rattled the one-page programme. “Follow this to the letter,” he said. “But otherwise, just listen to what the grown-ups tell you to do.”

  I took my one-sheet programme but as he went over it, I tuned out his voice. My mother, Medina and Pops appeared to be listening. Medina was staring at the programme as if she could read it.

  Father Hamlyn left.

  I wondered how many girls were waiting silently for me to arrive, watching to see what door I would emerge from; Percy Joyce with his port wine-stained face and swollen lips and oversized hands and feet that would disgust them just as much no matter how nicely he might be dressed or how recently his hair had been cut or how scrubbed and polished the rest of him might look. The girls of Mercy and Presentation and Belvedere and Holy Heart, especially Francine, would all be watching. The Big B could hold three thousand as long as the fire marshal wasn’t one of them. I thought of the girls from the bay on all the buses I had blessed, of Vivian in flagrante on the wall beside the leering Saint Drogo, Patron Saint of Unattractive People. Whenever I’d dreamed of doing it with a girl, I’d thought of doing it from behind so she wouldn’t see my face. I thought now of doing it that way with Francine—Francine willing and wanton and glad beyond words to have been chosen by His Grace to be my friend, Francine making noises like the ones Medina had made because she so liked what my mother’s hands and mouth were doing.

  So then I thought of doing it that way with my mother.

  To my horror, the front of my slacks bulged with a hard-on. What if I came, or even just leaked enough to make a wet spot on the
outside of my slacks? I tried not to think of girls or women, especially my mother, I tried not to think at all, but that didn’t work. My hard-on grew bigger. I felt it pulsing in my pants. I nudged my mother and pointed at my slacks. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said. “It’s because of you,” I whispered, “because of what you said last night.” “Do you have to pee?” she whispered back. I shook my head. Medina and Pops stared. Medina covered her hand with her mouth and Pops looked mortified.

  “Can’t you make it go away?” my mother asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” she said, enlarging her eyes as a warning that I should not allude again, even in a whisper, to last night.

  “I don’t know. I was thinking about girls, but now I’m not and it’s still— I think I might—”

  “Oh sweet, sweet Jesus,” my mother said.

  The door opened and Father Hamlyn burst in. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “Didn’t you read the programme? You were supposed to come out when the choir started the second hymn.”

  “Sorry,” my mother said. She put her lips to my ear. “Keep the programme in front of your pants. Once you get out there, you’ll be too distracted—”

  “Please,” Father Hamlyn cried. “You’re keeping the Archbishop waiting. Come on, come on. You, Percy, you go first.”

  Holding the one-page programme at crotch level, all but pressing it against me, I left the room and turned right, toward the baptistery, which was just inside the two large doors of the vestibule. I looked down the middle aisle at the sanctuary on the high altar that enclosed the tabernacle. I started down the middle aisle, but two hands that I somehow knew were McHugh’s all but closed around my neck and turned me about. I couldn’t hear a sound above the organ and the choir.

  At one of our catechism sessions, McHugh had had me memorize the prayer that was said by the Archbishop on the occasion of the elevation of the cathedral: “May the demons flee and the angels of peace enter as we, Thy humble servants, go inside. Behold the Sign of the Cross, let all the evil spirits flee. Give us salvation from our enemies and from the hand of those who hate us.” It seemed that those prayers had been composed and spoken specifically to ward off the Joyces, me foremost among them. The prayer had failed, for here we were, not just entering the Basilica but being escorted into it by a priest acting on the orders of the very archbishop who had spoken the exorcizing prayer. Me, the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I thought. The Bastard, Mother-Banging Boy of the Basilica. The Rapist of the Baptist. The Ugly Mother-Lusting Lad of the Basilica.

  Thus I set eyes at last on the inside of the Basilica. I had never walked beneath a ceiling even one-tenth as high and wide before. It seemed as if a many-floored structure had had its floors removed, had been hollowed out in the process of its transformation from a cathedral into this massive cavern. It seemed absurd that something so immense could be described as minor. Everything in it seemed oversized—the statues in the recessed Roman arches that lined the walls between the windows, the finely detailed, etched-in-wood stations of the cross, the width of the centre aisle and even the side aisles, the length of the centre aisle that led up to an altar as expansive as the parking lot of Holy Heart. At the rear of the high altar, which was flanked by lance-like candleholders, was the eight-columned sanctuary McHugh had described to me that protectively housed a tabernacle the size of a small car, a gleaming silver globe atop two golden doors. Looming above the tabernacle, stretching more than halfway to the ceiling, was a tapestry of the risen Christ with an infant in his arms. Arching over all of it was a frescoed ceiling whose images I could not have made out unless I had stopped walking and craned my neck to look straight up.

  Nothing in my line of vision bore the slightest blemish. Luridly coloured depictions of Christ’s gauntlet of agony on his way to Calvary were everywhere. Through panels of stained glass the height of hydro poles, sunlight shone in upon the congregation, each shaft of it teeming with motes of dust, while the walls between the windows shadowed the intervening pews, light and dark alternating from the base of the choir loft to the far-distant enclave of the altar.

  I felt overpowered, my blasphemous irreverence shouted down by the earnest enormity of what lay in front of me, the evidence of money spent, of countless hours of mass labour, the imperial seriousness of whoever had designed the place, the force of the unyielding faith and conviction of its framers, its leaders and its congregants. Could so much have been done by so many in error, in vanity, pomposity, unfounded fear and worship of an entity that did not exist, that mere humans had come up with out of self-delusion or hypocrisy, come up with as a means of amassing wealth, acquiring and wielding power, quelling fear and justifying hatred, commanding adoration for which they pretended to be mere conduits for the omnipotent Creator of All Things, humbly insignificant servants of God in comparison with whom the very universe was “minor”?

  I looked up at my mother and squeezed her hand. She seemed to be as much in awe as I was, seemed not to notice my appeal for a reassuring glance, a wink, a smile, something, anything to show that, in spite of everything, our conspiracy was still intact. But the very sight of her inspired in me such a resurgence of desire that I was soon concerned again with the matter that, had I been free to, I could have taken care of swiftly with one hand. My hard-on wrapped in paper, I was suddenly facing a phalanx of bishops, all variously attired in layers of vestments. They simultaneously blessed me, making the sign of the cross with their outstretched right arms. I saw a portly, white-haired one wince when I looked him in the eye; for him, for all of them who lived outside the city, it was their first sight of me. Then it occurred to me that it might not be my face he was wincing at. I nodded to him and he tried to smile.

  Percy Joyce. The clerics from around the bay had heard of me, had seen my picture in the Monitor in black-and-white, but were not, it was apparent by the way they looked at me, prepared for what they saw. So this was the Archbishop’s pet, his heart-rending afflicted favourite. For this boy the great occasion had been organized, the boy on whom, and on whose mother, so much misfortune had befallen. The hands on the base of my neck increased their grip, pushing me slowly forward as the bishops parted to let us through into the baptistery.

  In spite of McHugh’s assertion that my baptism would be the least of the reasons for this gathering, the Archbishop seemed to have done his utmost to make it the “theme” of the Mass. Because there, beside an enormous porcelain bowl, was the Archbishop, Uncle Paddy himself, mitred and holding his bejewelled, ornate shepherd’s staff. Thin, bespectacled, hawk-faced, his nose as prominent as Pope Paul’s, he smiled, but not in the way his Christmas card greetings had led me to imagine he would when at last we met again. He looked as though McHugh had apprised him of everything he knew or suspected about the Joyces. He came toward me and placed his free hand on my head.

  “Little Percy,” he whispered. “You’re not so little anymore, are you?”

  “No, Your Grace,” I managed to say. He smiled again and, as he turned away from me, I saw a fully lit TV camera in the open doorway of the church, aimed at me. Of the man who was aiming it, I saw only the hands. At an emphatic signal from Father Hamlyn, who raised his own hands in traffic-cop fashion, the camera was shut off. McHugh stood in front of me.

  “Hand me that piece of paper,” he said. I let go of the programme with one hand and motioned for him to lower himself to my height, all the while biting my lip to keep from thinking of anything related to girls and to distract myself from the sensation of my underwear rubbing the head of my dick each time I even slightly moved. McHugh crouched down, put his hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes with undisguised menace.

  I cupped my hand and whispered in his ear. “I peed in my pants a little bit,” I said. McHugh abruptly stood, looked about and motioned to an altar boy who was holding an incense-steaming thurible.

  “Give that to Dawe,” he said. The altar boy gave the thurible to the boy beside him and was soon standing by McHugh
. “Take off that surplice,” he said. The boy removed his surplice and, holding it in his hands, stood there wearing nothing but his red soutane. “Go to the sacristy and get another surplice for yourself,” McHugh told him.

  As the boy set off, McHugh, without a word of instruction to me, swiftly placed the surplice over my head and inserted my arms into it until the lacy garment came down past my waist. I still held the programme in one hand; I had had to take it away from my crotch when McHugh raised my arms, but, judging by the faces of everyone around me, no one noticed the bulge in my slacks. I looked down and saw that, although my hard-on showed faintly through the surplice, it was mostly disguised and, in all likelihood, would be mistaken by others for a mere bunching of the cloth.

  Five Christian Brothers, one on each arm and each leg and one with his hands supporting me from underneath, lifted me and dipped me backward over the bowl. I was splayed out supine, eyes focused on the frescoed ceiling of the Basilica, cradled by five Christian Brothers who, if not for the surplice, surely would have seen my bulging crotch. There were two hands on my lower right leg, the bare part where my slacks pulled up. I recognized the grip as McHugh’s. Throughout the baptism, those hands gave me what the boys at school called an “Indian burn”—one hand twisting the skin on my leg one way, the other twisting it the other way, as if McHugh were wringing blood from my leg like water from a towel. I clenched my teeth to keep from howling, but not even the pain made me feel any less as though I was on the verge of coming. Using a barely concave silver cup, the Archbishop three times scooped warm chrism oil—olive oil, balm and water—and poured it over my forehead. I felt the crawling flood of it as he said: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The Brothers raised me to a standing position.