The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  So they argued on and on, not really shouting, merely picking at each other, throughout most of which my mother smiled and Medina frowned and pouted, arms folded across her chest. My mother laughed. Medina laughed. Medina talked herself out. I could tell that my mother knew she would. She didn’t get upset. She seemed to assume that I too knew Medina didn’t mean a word of it, for she paid me no mind as they were jousting. They wound up, after Pops came home from Brother Rice and took up his place in the armchair in the sunroom, drinking beer and playing cards in the kitchen until late at night, laughing as if the point of an argument was to joke about it afterward.

  My mother, to my disappointment, did relent and stopped wearing her bathrobe while working, switching to skirts and blouses and high-heeled shoes as if she were a receptionist.

  I can’t remember not knowing what “it” was. My mother and Medina swore I always knew, never bothering to explain how innate knowledge of anything was possible. They both said they never told me, so I suppose it’s possible that I always knew. My mother said that I was “gaping” at girls and women by the time I was five. She said she doubted that my “condition” had anything to do with it, but I was as hyper-sexed as some people thought my condition fated me to be, precocious in the extreme when it came to maturation. She knew, she said; she did the laundry and never overlooked or ceased to be amazed by what she called a “crusty crotch.” She didn’t know that, even then, the object of my desire, the object of my dreams both dry and wet was Penny Joyce.

  The Archbishop began to send me special occasion cards:

  Merry Christmas, Percy. May God bless you and watch over you on His special day. I want you and your mother to know that I remember both of you each day in my prayers. May I humbly ask that both of you remember me in yours? Yours in Christ, P.J. Scanlon, CJM, Archbishop of St. John’s.

  Sometimes he referred to me in writing as Little Percy and wrote to me as though to a colleague whose job was as important and difficult as his.

  Well Little Percy, Merry Christmas to you and your mother. Isn’t this a busy time of year for people like us? But we must not forget the importance of Christmas, which celebrates the birthday of our Saviour, The Lord Jesus Christ, who loves us and watches over us always. Well, I must get back to my duties as you must get back to yours. Again Little Percy, Merry Christmas and my best wishes to you and your mother, Penelope, for the New Year: Yours in Christ, Archbishop P.J. Scanlon, CJM, December 12, 1961.

  “I’m surprised he doesn’t sign the cards ‘Your pal, Paddy,’ ” my mother said, though she always helped me reply to the Archbishop’s card with one of my own.

  Merry Christmas, Your Grace. I had a cold but now I’m fine. I hope you don’t get a cold. My mother is fine too. Happy New Year: Percy Joyce, ESQ., December 17, 1961.

  “I guess it’s good to have friends in high places,” my mother said. I took her words literally and imagined my friend the Archbishop writing to me from high up in the Basilica. “He never forgets to send you a card. Easter, your birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, even Valentine’s. I think he’s using the soft-sell approach to bring us back to the Church. I hope that when he realizes it won’t work, we don’t have an enemy in high places.”

  Pops said he was sure that the Archbishop was just being nice and had no ulterior motive. But priests from the Basilica who didn’t use the soft-sell approach and were sent to our house by His Grace exhorted—in some cases ordered—my mother to have me baptized. “Round number two of the basilica missionaries,” my mother called them, remembering the priests who had tried in vain to convince her to have me baptized just after I was born. My mother never let them in, even though they roared so loudly the neighbours came out on their steps to watch and listen to them. Father Wallis, the tallest, brawniest priest I had ever seen and the only person I had ever seen who was completely bald, beat on the locked door as he roared: “That boy must be baptized. His very soul depends on it. What if he should perish in his bed tonight? What then, Miss Joyce? What would happen to his soul?”

  “Go away,” my mother said to him through the front door. “We have all the guilt we need right here in this house.”

  “What a sacrilege it is that a boy born on the feast day of Saint John the Baptist has yet to be baptized.”

  JIM JOYCE

  FOR a while I believed that my father was killed in a car crash when he missed the turn at the bottom of the Curve of Bonaventure, which was as steep, and in the winter often as icy, as a bobsled run. We lived halfway down the hill where the street turned sharply across from Brother Rice. Instead of a front yard fence, we had, courtesy of the city, a concrete traffic barrier, the Block, that was meant to stop any vehicle that didn’t make the turn. I was as unconvinced of the need for it as my mother was that it could stop a car until the winter night a Vauxhall crashed into it long after we had gone to bed, not budging it an inch, the crumpled car pointed straight at the front of our house, its drunk driver having fallen asleep behind the wheel.

  The explosion and vibrations of the crash shook the windows of the house, rattled dishes in the cupboards, upended lamps. Shards of glass and metal flew up and over the Block, clattered like shrapnel against our windows, embedded themselves in the clapboard. It seemed like just the sort of dramatic, spectacular re-entrance into our lives that Jim Joyce should make.

  According to Pops—the only one from 44 who joined the neighbours when they went out to investigate—the driver was all but unmarked. I watched everything from the front room window, the crowd, the police, the ambulance, the flashing lights, the stretcher bearing the man whose every inch but for his face was covered by blue blankets. A face, I noted, that wasn’t the colour of mine, but then neither was my mother’s. I watched until all that was left were a few people standing around, staring at the Block, talking and smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet to keep them warm.

  “Cars,” Pops said for days afterward, chuckling as if in scorn of newfangled contraptions that would never catch on.

  “Yes, Pops, cars,” my mother said. “You’d have one if you weren’t such a cheapskate.”

  “I don’t have a driver’s licence,” Pops said.

  “It’s not something you’re either born with or you’re not,” my mother said. “You can get one. I have one.”

  “I have a perfectly good pair of legs.”

  “You’re not still living in that godforsaken outport where everything is close to everything else.”

  The Block. Whatever reassurance I had gained from its success was more than undone by the fact that I now knew the Block was necessary, that it really was all that stood between us and out-of-control cars. That the Block had worked once was no proof that it would work again. For many nights afterward, I knelt on the front room sofa and watched the headlights of every car that came down Bonaventure, in part keeping vigil for Jim Joyce, who I believed was the dead-looking man beneath the blankets, and in part dreading that another car would ram the Block that, for all I knew, would not hold up a second time. The lights of the cars shone straight into the house, getting brighter and brighter until, just short of the Curve, they swerved and disappeared. Each car seemed certain to continue straight into the Block. I let out a gasp each time a car seemed late in turning. One night I stayed up so late that my mother came out and knelt beside me on the sofa.

  “He’s only been gone a few years. That’s what you said.”

  “Percy,” she said, “Jim Joyce was not of woman born.”

  “How old is he?” I said.

  “Twenty-eight. But not in human years. Jim Joyce was so unique that even time had no effect on him.”

  In daytime, I often stood outside by the Block, from the safe side of which it became my habit to watch cars and pedestrians go by. Other boys my age, four or so, curious to see me close up, came by then. I told them my father had been killed in a car crash but his death had been hushed up for reasons I was not allowed to talk about. At other times I told them that, like the driver, my
father had survived the crash without a scratch but, for reasons I was not allowed to talk about, had been whisked away from the scene before anyone noticed he was in the car. I kept a mental dossier of lies about Jim Joyce. That these lies were contradictory did not deter me from telling both to the same people. For me the point was that the stories brought me attention and brought me company—they drew the other children to me with stories that they knew were lies but pretended to believe in order to entice me into telling more—such as that my father had not been in the car at all but in the one behind it that was chasing it and sped away when it crashed. I told them that by his absence he was helping the Church, the police, the army. I said he had broken off his engagement to my pregnant mother because she heroically insisted that he put his secret responsibilities above all others. Someday he’d be back, but not even then, I said, would I be allowed to tell them why he’d left.

  SISTER MARY AGGIE

  and

  THE PATRON SAINT OF UNATTRACTIVE PEOPLE

  STANDING beside the Block, at the foot of the Mount, a tiny sentinel in front of 44, my face and hands as distantly visible as red flags, I became a neighbourhood fixture, the little Joyce boy in his oversized shoes, with large hands that flapped about on the ends of his wrists like the ears of a rabbit. I stayed close where my mother could see me from the kitchen window. I obeyed her order not to venture onto Bonaventure and simply stood by the Block, hoping to be noticed and spoken to. There was no better place to meet what Pops called “the vermin on the Mount.”

  Most of the clerics waved to me as they went by or stopped to ask me how I was, even the spooky Capuchins whose faces I couldn’t make out and who walked with each of their hands in the opposite sleeve, each of them one scythe short of being the Grim Reaper. Some people thought my stained face to be an attendant symptom of retardation. Others, because of my oversized hands and feet, mistook me for a dwarf, doubly damned. Most grown-ups were quite friendly and called me by name. “Hello, Percy, how are you today?” “I’m fine, thank you.” “That’s good. You’re so polite.” I was sometimes given candy treats and was always hoping for one. “Poor little thing,” I heard a woman say to her husband after they had gone by. Poor little cheerful, attention-craving, candy-deprived, friendless son of a certain woman who already regarded with suspicion every face that turned his way lest he see in it a look of revulsion or be gawked at by someone who thought that no one with such a face would notice. Poor little boy whose innocence would not hold up much longer against what lay in store for him.

  On the cusp of what I thought would be my first year of school, in the warm summer months, I kept watch at the Block. One day, a woman whose age I couldn’t guess and who was dressed like a nun came by and gave me a Mass card and told me to give it to my mother and have her teach me the prayer on the back that asked the Patron Saint of Unattractive People, Saint Drogo, to intercede with God on my behalf. She told me that, compared to Saint Drogo, who voluntarily hid himself for life inside a cell attached to his church lest his ugliness scare people into mistaking him for Satan, I was “a handsome young man.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, in a way that seemed meant to convey serenity, a fearless, God-conferred reconciliation to all possible happenstance and fates.

  On the card there was a cartoon-like depiction of Saint Drogo, his grossly misshapen face more comical than otherwise as he stared out the window of his cell. On the back of the card was a prayer: “Let them not be judged, O Lord, by their earthly appearance, but let Your glorious Light shine upon them that all may see the everlasting Beauty of their Souls.” Beneath this, in smaller letters, the card read: “A small contribution would be appreciated. May God bless you and keep you, forever and ever. Amen.”

  “Is this how she gets by, handing out prayer cards to children whose parents she expects will pay for them?” my mother said. “Saint Drogo. I’m sure there was no such person. Drogre is probably how they came up with it. Drogre. Dr. Ogre. I think I know where his office is.” She turned to me. “I don’t think you should keep this card.” She put it on the windowsill above the sink, and in the morning it was gone.

  Medina said she knew the woman. They’d never met, but she’d seen her on the street a few times. She went by the name of Sister Mary Aggie, from Mary Agnes. Medina didn’t know her last name. “She’s harmless—she used to be a nun, or she thinks she still is one, or something.” She said Sister Mary Aggie was a kind of self-ordained missionary but was known to run a one-woman brothel out of the single room in which she lived. “A missionary prostitute,” my mother sighed. “Wonderful.”

  Sister Mary Aggie made up a clerical order of one. She wore a headdress much like the one worn by the nuns of the Mount—a black veil and white cowl that completely hid her hair. It was not winged like those of the Presentation nuns, nor as high and narrow as those of the Mercy nuns. Instead of a frock, she wore a belted, tattered grey dress. Her shoes must once have looked like nun’s shoes, but they were encrusted with mud and dust and lacked laces so that she had to scuff along to keep them from falling off.

  Medina told us she’d been at one time a patient of the Mental, but hadn’t been hospitalized in more than a year, having somehow got to the point where her eccentricities were indulged by the various local authorities, even the Church, which had not been amused by her nun-aping caricature. She now lived in the basement of a nearby house on Garrison Hill. One evening, when my mother, Medina and I went out for an evening walk, each of them taking turns holding me in her arms when I got tired, we went to Garrison Hill and saw that in the window of Sister Mary Aggie’s room was a picture of the Sacred Heart, the garish heart lit from within by a red Christmas light that blinked at heartbeat intervals. Above and below the Sacred Heart, the window read:

  SISTER MARY AGGIE’S HOME FOR WAYWARD SOULS

  Sister Mary Aggie returned to the Block one afternoon, talking loudly although she was alone. She looked at me and wiped her face on her coat sleeve as if wiping away a port wine stain of her own.

  “Do you have something for me?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  She said, “That face is your mother’s fault. When she carried you, she went outside during an eclipse. That’s why you have that face. Now your face is stuck like that. Even if you go to Heaven, your face will still be stuck like that and people who earned their way into Heaven will have to put up with the sight of you. You’ll spoil Heaven for everyone else.” Her words stung but I could think of no reply.

  She gave me another Saint Drogo Mass card. “Give this to your mother,” she said.

  “She wants me to pay her for the card,” I said to my mother.

  “No,” my mother said. “She wants me to pay for it. If you give her a cent, she’ll never stop coming back for more. Perhaps you shouldn’t stand out by the Block. God knows what hurtful nonsense someone will spout to you next.”

  I protested but she did not relent until Medina pleaded my cause, saying it was good for me not to hole up in the house, good for me to get used to people and for people to get used to me. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to people telling him such vicious things,” my mother said, and Pops, who’d been listening silently in the sunroom, piped up that no one ever got used to anyone. My mother said that anyone who stayed out by the Block long enough would meet all kinds. “So let him meet all kinds,” Medina said, smoothing the hair at the back of my head.

  Sister Mary Aggie came back again. “Do you have something for me this time?”

  I shook my head.

  She gave me a third card. “You’re not baptized and you and your mother never go to church,” she said. “You might not even have a middle name.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Well, things can’t be left like that. I’ll baptize you.” She took from the pocket of her frayed grey coat a small glass vial. “Holy water,” she said, “from the Shrine of Sainte Anne de Beaupré. You’re going to need more than a patron saint looking out for you.” She sprinkle
d the sign of the cross on me and sprinkled my face, saying: “I baptize you, Percy Patrick Joyce, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Nothing on earth will fix your face. Remember, no matter what happens, no matter what people say or do, God is always with you, Percy Patrick Joyce.”

  And then she continued on her way down Bonaventure, talking loudly as if conversing with someone who was nearly deaf. I told my mother what the woman had done and gave her the third card.

  “She can’t just go around throwing water on people,” my mother protested. “Or baptizing them or giving them names or handing out these cards as if they’re redeemable coupons. Anyway, Percy, your middle name is not Patrick, do you hear me?” I nodded. “And don’t tell anyone it is. She named you after the Archbishop. Especially don’t tell them that. Don’t tell them anything about the old woman.”

  “Come on, Pen,” Medina said.

  “Come on nothing! She’s fastened onto Percy as if she thinks they have something in common. I should have a word with her. What if it hadn’t been water in that vial? You can’t have a crazy woman going around sprinkling children with what might or might not be holy water. There could have been anything in that bottle. Even if it was water, it could have been water from a ditch.”

  “Percy looks okay to me,” Medina murmured.

  “Did you get any in your mouth? Did you swallow any?” my mother demanded of me.

  “I got some on my lips.” I put out my tongue to lick them tentatively. “It tasted just like water.”