The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “She’s my only friend,” my mother said.

  “You have Percy, a family, a purpose, structure—”

  “Medina’s part of all that, part of my family.”

  “Well, I’d like to think that I’m your friend. Haven’t I been your friend?”

  “You’ve been good to us, to Percy and me,” my mother said. “But there’s no need to put a label on your place in this household. You’re Pops. Our Pops. No one else has one.”

  Pops smiled at her and then at me. I wondered what it meant, that smile.

  I was at least blessed with a mind like my mother’s. “Hey, Perse,” she said, “shouldn’t you be solving something? A math problem? Differential calculus? Einstein’s beef with quantum physics?”

  “I’m not as smart as you.”

  “You will be. You’ll be smarter. Imagine how pleased your teachers would be if you could speak Latin by the time you start school next year.”

  Not yet five, I was reading at the grade five level, had memorized the multiplication tables into the highest double digits, was adept at long division of numbers up to ten digits, could identify every country in the world on a map Pops brought home from Brother Rice that showed nothing but borders. I wasn’t especially interested in any of it, but Pops said that eventually my mind would find its focus. “Maybe not,” my mother said. “He might be like me, a jack of all things and a genius of none.”

  “He’s his mother’s boy,” Pops said. “He’s smarter than anyone else his age I’ve come across. But he’ll have to progress through school like everybody else. Skipping grades isn’t allowed.”

  “He’ll be bored.”

  “It can’t be helped.”

  Pops said that Brother Rice’s principal, Brother McHugh—who already seemed to be planning my future because, Pops said, he often spoke of me to him—guessed that I would, like my mother, turn out to be not a true genius but merely someone who could easily absorb the work of others. Like her, I would never discover, deduce, figure out, invent anything wholly new. Pops informed us that Brother McHugh—or Director McHugh, as he always called him—said that at best I would be a receptacle for knowledge but not a finder of new knowledge. That he foresaw me as a parrot, a perfect register, a regurgitator of facts, an ever-expanding encyclopedia, a data repository, a potential quiz show prodigy, a human archive who would barely have enough sense to come in from the rain. He told Pops that he attributed my precocious knowledge to my having so much time to study, there being little else a boy like me could do. What else, he said, but precociousness would you expect from a friendless freak holed up in his house, whose hands and feet prevented him from playing any sport or game that required the least bit of athleticism?

  “Who the fuck is this McHugh?” my mother said. Who the fuck indeed—but it’s too soon to bring him out.

  My mother found books for me at the Gosling Library, classic English novels mostly, books by Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. She read them aloud to me. She read to me a biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, a dwarf of a man the book told us, that was enlivened for me by the artist’s addiction to the services of prostitutes. “It’s so stupid,” my mother said as she pressed Ivanhoe upon me. “You really should wind up in some sort of class for gifted children. But what can we do? There are no such classes in Newfoundland. There wouldn’t be much point in you graduating from high school at the age of ten, anyway.” But I was glad. It was a prospect I dreaded, being pushed even further from the centre of normalcy—both gifted and disfigured, a student body of one.

  I’d say that, all in all, it’s to my credit that I didn’t turn out to be an arsonist.

  UNCLE PADDY AND THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

  ARCHBISHOP P.J. Scanlon, Patrick James Scanlon, was known to many on the Mount as “Uncle Paddy.” The Archbishop’s limousine was called the Paddy Wagon. It went up Bonaventure at exactly four o’clock every afternoon, bound for the Basilica—coming from where I didn’t know, though every afternoon I knelt on the old sofa beneath our front room window to watch it pass.

  I was under the Archbishop’s protection—under Uncle Paddy’s wing, people said, as if he had assigned me a bodyguard or let me live in the Basilica. But the only thing he did publicly for me was preach a sermon when I was four. He said in his sermon that he hoped it would not get back to him that anyone had been teasing or mistreating me. He said, “Hereby I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of these the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” He was quoting Christ’s words as recorded by Matthew in the Gospels, but he was taken to mean that anyone who interfered with Percy Joyce interfered with him.

  “Percy is a special boy born on a special day, June 24, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, after whom the Basilica is named, to whom it is dedicated and by whom it is blessed and watched over, and the day that the site of this city, which bears his name, was discovered by John Cabot in 1497.”

  He said that for anyone June 24 was an “auspicious” day on which to be born, but especially for a person from St. John’s.

  Many pointed out that, as there were 365 days in the year and about sixty thousand people in the city, it was likely that about 150 people of St. John’s had been born on June 24, so what made Little Percy so unique? His face, his hands, his feet? If those were the price of a Sermon on the Mount, I was welcome to all the sermons and blessings the Archbishop wanted to bestow upon me.

  The sermon earned my mother and me a lot of resentment. People didn’t think it was right that the Archbishop should remove me from the daily school of hard knocks just because of my disfigurements, or be so obvious about playing favourites. There were several other unfortunates among the children of the Mount: a boy confined to a wheelchair because of polio, an epileptic girl, a boy with Down’s syndrome, a boy who had to gimp about with his legs spread-eagled by a pair of hip-high plaster casts connected at the ankles by a metal rod.

  My mother was not on hand to hear the sermon, but Medina was. Medina, who told my mother that the Archbishop had several times referred to me in his sermon as The Little Joyce Boy, one word away from The Little Drummer Boy. The Archbishop’s sermon, Medina said, was not about me, Perse, per se. He merely used me as an example of the kind of person Christ was speaking of when he exhorted his listeners to treat even the supposedly lowest of the low no differently than they treated Him, for the low were of Him, part of Him, as deserving of respect and kindness as His other children. But the Archbishop did, Medina said, spend a lot of time talking about me, me whom he said he had glimpsed one day from the back seat of his limousine as he was passing 44 and I was sitting on the steps on my mother’s lap. “The poor little lad,” the Archbishop called me, saying that he had a brother who now lived on the Mainland who had been born with a cleft palate and so he knew all too well what was waiting for me, unless everyone pulled together to prevent it.

  Soon after seeing me, he directed his assistants to find out everything they could about me and my family. In his sermon, he portrayed my mother as someone who had turned away from God and the Church because she wrongly believed that God, by allowing her fiancé to abandon her when she was pregnant, and by disfiguring her child when it was in her womb, had turned away from her. But he predicted, even seemed to prophesy, that Penelope Joyce, the Prodigal Daughter, would one day return to her Father, and with her would bring Percy, whom he knew was not baptized and whose eternal soul was therefore imperilled with every passing moment. “The sooner their return comes to pass, the better,” he said, as if he was instructing the congregation to hurry near the day of our salvation.

  For a child to flout the Archbishop’s wishes meant that his or her entire family would earn his ire, which might lead to being snubbed or ostracized, not being invited to Church events or to join Church clubs such as the Knights of Columbus or the Holy Name Society. Boys were warned by their parents not to do anything to me that would land them and their families in Uncle Paddy’s bad books. There was no
telling what opportunities a boy who provoked the Archbishop might be denied by the Christian Brothers and the nuns. The most devout on the Mount were concerned about earning the ire of God Himself, and warned their children that to disobey the Archbishop was to disobey God and there was no telling what would come of that.

  I was regarded by many as if I had somehow obtained my clemency through the sexual conniving of my mother. “What do they think,” she wondered, “that I slept with the Archbishop?” She wished Uncle Paddy hadn’t referred to me as the least of his brethren, but she also said that it was good to know that a person of such power and influence was in my corner. But having warranted a Sermon on the Mount eventually drew me to the primary attention of Brother McHugh—Director/Principal McHugh—who might otherwise have ignored me.

  Not long after the Sermon on the Mount, Pops convinced my mother that it would do no harm to accede to the Archbishop’s request to meet us privately at the Basilica at Christmas. The Archbishop lived in the Basilica Residence, a three-storey stone house behind the Basilica and forever in its shadow.

  When my mother took me there, we were shown to a private room in the Archbishop’s private quarters, one as cluttered with antiques as a museum. The Basilica Residence was as ornately designed and decorated as the Basilica itself. There was a wooden sculpture of the Baby Jesus done by some famous nineteenth-century Irish artist. Under glass, there was the Cappa Magna, an ermine cape worn by one of the first archbishops of St. John’s. My mother said later she hardly moved or let me move for fear that we would break something priceless. The Archbishop sat in a throne-backed chair in front of which two chairs were placed side by side for us. Uncle Paddy wore a black soutane with a middle row of brass buttons, and a red skullcap. Two young deacons, who might have been twins, both dark-haired, pale, ascetic, Jesuitical, wearing glasses with thick black rims, flanked him like a pair of Swiss guards.

  His Grace put his left hand on my head, seemed to improvise some sort of benediction and with his right hand made the sign of the cross very close to my face, referring to me always as “Little Percy.”

  “Born on the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. We may say that in a sense he is your patron saint.” He patted or stroked my cheek several times as he spoke to my mother, held me by my overlarge hands, telling her that God had made me as I was for a purpose that might not seem apparent to us for a long time. He said that although my childhood might be difficult for both of us, we should not despair, and added that he hoped her own troubles would not prevent her from returning to the Church and raising her son “in the religion in which his parents were baptized.” My mother made no promises but thanked him for taking the time to see me. She said that he seemed not at all put off by my appearance but, on the contrary, “took a real shine to you,” constantly smiling at me as if he knew that one day I would come to see my affliction as being of no great consequence, as if he was so certain of my future happiness that he saw it as clearly as something that had already come to pass.

  Before we left, Uncle Paddy offered my mother a job as secretary in the Basilica. Since my birth, she had been a freelance typist who worked at home. When my mother, saying that I needed her at 44, declined his offer, he said he understood, but added that she could do the job of basilica secretary at home. She would be his typist—a part-time position: deacons would deliver to her home whatever needed to be typed, such as letters dictated to and written in shorthand by “busy” stenographers, which would need to be transcribed. The deacons would come to collect them when my mother was finished. She knew this arrangement would only complicate the running of the basilica office and make it more expensive, since any of the “busy” stenographers could have typed, more easily than her, what they wrote in their own shorthand. But she told Medina afterward that she understood he wanted it to seem that he was doing her a favour, making the lives of his staff a touch more difficult for the sake of Little Percy Joyce and his mother. She knew that his real purpose was to maintain daily contact of a sort with us. He had—each visit by a deacon would remind us—made us a public project and could not be seen as merely paying lip service to the notion that we were as worthy of salvation as anyone else.

  So my mother accepted the position of basilica secretary. Salary-wise, she said, he had thrown us a not-very-juicy bone, but she would make more money than she had before. So the acolyte deacons came by 44 at random intervals, always on foot for the Basilica was just a few hundred feet away, sometimes delivering mere envelopes or folders, sometimes whole boxes of documents, the originals of which my mother would return to them when she was done, along with her typed facsimiles that always bore the Basilica’s official letterhead and stamp. She’d phone the basilica office to inform them that a pickup was needed at 44, and soon after, no matter what the weather, a deacon would turn up on the doorstep, often dripping wet, or his cassock soaked or rimed with snow, the lenses of his inevitable glasses fogged up, rain-splattered, snow-coated, looking like twin windshields through which the young man peered at the apparition of Penny Joyce.

  She’d invite them in, but they’d politely decline, standing on the steps beneath the overhang until she came back with whatever parcel they’d been sent to fetch, which they would stow away inside one of the duffle bags they carried on their shoulders.

  “They’d throw themselves under a bus if Uncle Paddy asked them to,” my mother said.

  “Or if you asked them to,” Medina shot back.

  Whenever Medina’s hospital work hours were cut back—which happened frequently, unemployment being so high—she’d spend some or all of the day with us at 44. “You should see how disappointed they look”—Medina laughed—“when I answer the door.” I often went to the door with my mother to greet the deacons, whom I came to know by name. “Hello, Martin,” I’d say, and Martin, transfixed by the sight of my mother, eyes locked on her over my head, would say, “Hello, Percy.”

  I imagine them now, looking back on their deaconship as the time when they were daily tested by the sight of Penny Joyce, those poor young basilican celibates, now young priests trying not to recall with longing that fleeting year when they were required to gaze upon her every day, required to complete with Penny Joyce a wholly legitimate, respectably justified transaction that did not constitute any sort of breach of their soon-to-be-set-in-stone vows of chastity. They came and went, like a succession of rejected suitors. Day after day, year after year, the drove of drones sent out from the hive of the Big B came to 44, cookie-cut deacons who never aged, as if the same forever-to-be-on-the-verge-of-ordination acolytes were doomed to an eternity of bearing gifts to the soul-destroying sorceress of 44.

  They slept in a rear annex to the Basilica Residence, a kind of dormitory where, it’s easy to imagine, they were all simultaneously kept awake by the image of my mother framed by the doorway of the porch at 44, dressed in a belted bathrobe that, though it showed less of her than her skirts and blouses did, was—they were certain—all that she wore, easy to imagine my mother as the common goad of their desire as they lay there on their bunks on their backs, trying to resist doing what they would have to admit to having done at their next confession. Dear Lord, keep the Evil One away, and keep my hand away from his Minion in my underwear, the little serpent that is modelled after him, the part of my very body which Thou made in his image and attached to me and which I am forbidden to use except to pee.

  “One of those basilica boys is coming down the hill,” Medina would say as she stood at the window, keeping watch for them. She said they looked as if their parents had talked them into being priests, or their teachers had, or someone. She hated to think what they’d let themselves be driven to ten years from now. Some of them had declared as early as grade seven that they had heard the call of the priesthood. They either believed that to be a priest was to be heroic in the way that other boys believed that to be one of the few good men of the Marines was to be heroic, or else it was the opposite and they knew even as early as twelve years old
that they’d never make it in the outside world. Medina said she was sick of the sight of them on the doorstep, gaping at my mother as if they’d never seen a woman who was not a nun before. They were acne-ridden youngsters who thought it was a mortal sin to obey their bodies, who wished they didn’t have bodies even as they jerked off in their beds at night and wondered, as they would until they died or did it with a boy, what they were missing.

  I thought Medina said these things because she was jealous of my mother’s beauty. I didn’t yet know that it was the worshippers of Penny Joyce that she was jealous of, which is to say just about every man who ever set eyes on my mother, not to mention a good many women. “Bedroom eyes,” Medina remarked. “They look at you like you’re wearing nothing but a watch.”

  Why, she asked my mother once, did she ask the basilica boys to come in when she knew they’d say no? Why did she lead them on and flirt with them? My mother said she never led them on or flirted with them. Medina said that if answering the door in your bathrobe wasn’t flirting, there was no such thing. My mother said that one of the perks of working at home was working in your bathrobe. Why did she have to smile at them the way she did? My mother said she didn’t even know she was smiling, but she guessed that was just her way of being polite, friendly, nice, whatever. Medina said she liked to lead boys and men on, whether they were seminarians, priests, single, engaged, married, my mother didn’t care. And then Medina’s voice rose unhappily though I didn’t understand why. Why, she said, didn’t she take that stupid engagement ring off and put her money where her come-hither mouth was? Men didn’t just get it into their heads that she was asking for it, so why didn’t she just say yes to one she liked and get on with it and finish what she’d started with Jim Joyce? It wasn’t like she had a reputation to protect, an unmarried mother, a woman who answered the door wearing next to nothing. It wasn’t fair, especially to celibate cocks, to be a cockteaser. Why didn’t she just see if she could get one of them to throw off his vocation? She shouldn’t let self-respect get in the way!