“Jesus,” my mother said. She announced she would have a word with Sister Mary Aggie the next time she came down the Curve of Bonaventure. She told me I should come inside and let her know if I saw Sister Mary Aggie coming down the hill. “And you stay inside,” she said.
I did as she told me, running inside the next time I spotted Sister Mary Aggie at the top of Bonaventure. It was seven in the evening in July, Pops was in his sunroom, and Medina and my mother were playing cards. “Here she comes,” I shouted, running into the kitchen. “Stay here,” my mother ordered. I stayed inside for as long as it took Sister Mary Aggie to reach the Block, then went outside and stood beside my mother and Medina. My mother looked down at me, shook her head with exasperation, then pointed at Sister Mary Aggie.
“You,” she said. “Sister Mary Aggie. Leave Percy alone. Use the other side of the street from now on.”
“You’re the boy’s mother. A Jezebel. Women like you used to work for me. Back in the days of the Empire.”
“She means Empire Avenue,” Medina said. “There was a whorehouse on Empire Avenue. But she was never in charge of it or anything like that.”
“Another Jezebel.” Two of them. Going at it like a brace of rabbits. It takes one to know two.”
My mother gaped open-mouthed at Sister Mary Aggie and then Medina, who ever so slightly shook her head.
“Shut up,” my mother hissed, looking around at the houses on either side of ours. “Shut up unless you liked the Mental more than I think you did.”
“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Sister Mary Aggie said, raising her eyebrows.
“I want you to stay away from my boy, Percy, from now on. I don’t want you giving him Mass cards or pretending you can baptize him or perform some other sacrament. I don’t want him to come indoors and tell me that he’s been confirmed or married or just went to confession or is doomed to Goddamn Hell. I don’t want you talking to him at all, do you understand?”
“Nothing I did was against the law. If you call the police, all they’ll do is talk to me. They like me. I know all of them by name.”
“I won’t call the police. I’ll call His Grace the Archbishop. He likes Percy.”
Sister Mary Aggie looked momentarily perturbed but quickly recovered. “I like the boy too,” she said.
“Here”—my mother extended the three Mass cards to Sister Mary Aggie—“I’m not paying for these.”
“I gave them to the boy. They belong to him.”
“He doesn’t want them.”
Sister Mary Aggie looked at me. “I think he does,” she said. “He accepted them. Besides, it’s bad luck to refuse a Mass card. To refuse three, well. Three is a very important number. Three blessings or three curses, as the case may be.”
“First it’s blackmail,” my mother whispered. “Pay me for my cards or else.… You speak of curses and gossip in front of Percy once more and—”
“And what? If you’re really not afraid of curses and don’t want any blessings for your boy, you can tear up the cards and throw them on the ground right here in front of him.”
“We don’t want them.” She whispered again: “Say whatever you want to whomever you want. You’re as mad as a hatter and no one will believe a word of it.”
I wanted the cards, would have wanted them even if she hadn’t offered the choice of blessings or curses, but now I especially wanted them.
“Mom, can I have the cards?” I said.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” said Sister Mary Aggie.
My mother thrust the cards at me and wagged her finger at Sister Mary Aggie.
“Not one cent. That’s what you’re getting for your cards.”
“Jezebel. Slut,” Sister Mary Aggie said. “They’re not my cards. They belong to the boy now. He looks like he would pay me if he could.”
“You’re nothing but a common peddler,” my mother said. “You peddle superstition in the streets. I’m sure you have a card for every occasion and ailment.”
“The Holy Father sends them to me.” Sister Mary Aggie smirked.
My mother took a step toward her. “I think you’re a beggar. More lazy than crazy. Too lazy to work.”
Sister Mary Aggie faintly nodded. “In My name shall ye be persecuted. Scorn, torment and martyrdom shall be your lot if ye follow Me. But ye shall thereby enter into the Kingdom of God.”
“Now she thinks she’s God Almighty.” Medina laughed.
Sister Mary Aggie, without the slightest motion of her head, shifted her eyes to Medina. “I remember Mr. Joyce, your brother. Sometimes he gave me loaves of bread. He got away while the getting was good, didn’t he? He wasn’t getting any at home.”
“Where did he go?” I asked her, but she merely looked up at the sky.
“You wouldn’t happen to know who the Patron Saint of Hangovers is, would you?” Medina said, but she sounded nervous.
“Jezebels,” Sister Mary Aggie said, her voice as serene as ever. “A brace of Jezebels. A tandem of tarts. I know. It takes one to know two. Back at the Empire, your kind was in great demand. You could wind up in jail. Or worse. A lot worse. I know what goes on in the Mental. You’d be fried like fish on Friday. Or maybe have an operation. Two scars apiece. I made a lot of money during the war, from the Yanks and the British and the Canadians too. I know what’s going on. The bats are in the belfry and the rats are in the basement, mark my words.”
“Here, Pen,” Medina said, “here’s two dimes,” cocking her head at me and winking as she held the two coins out to my mother. My mother took the coins but put them in her pocket.
“Not one cent,” she said, making a sudden lunge at Sister Mary Aggie, who all but ran away, gesticulating with her hands above her head as if she were fending off things falling from the sky.
My mother grabbed my shoulder. “This is why I told you to stay inside. Don’t say a word to Pops about what Mary Aggie said. She’s out of her mind, but Pops might try to make something out of nothing.” She turned me briskly about and the three of us went indoors.
But Pops had been watching from the front window and wanted to know what had happened. When Medina told him as much as she safely could, he said, “You did the right thing, Paynelope. Percy doesn’t believe in curses, do you, Percy?” I shook my head without conviction. “You should burn those cards, Paynelope. Just so the boy doesn’t dwell on them.”
“No,” I put my hand behind my back quickly. “Mom gave the cards to me.”
“That’s right,” my mother said. “Sister Mary Aggie didn’t give them to you, I did. There’s no such thing as a curse, but if there was, the three of them would be on my head, not yours. Oh, what am I saying? Now you’re going to think I’m cursed.”
“No, I’m not.”
I taped the cards to the wall above the upper of the two bunks of my bed, two with Saint Drogo facing out, the other between them with the prayer side facing out: “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.… A small contribution would be appreciated. May God bless you and keep you, forever and ever. Amen.”
When my mother saw them taped to the wall, she said, “Jesus, Percy, wouldn’t you rather collect hockey cards or something?”
“Well, Pen,” Medina said, “you told him you’d let him make up his own mind about religion.”
“Religion?” my mother said. “That’s not religion. It’s worse. Those cards won’t change anything, Percy. They won’t make anything better. You know that, right?”
I nodded. “They’re just for fun.”
“And whatever you do,” she said, “stay away from Sister Mary Aggie from now on. Not one more piece of her merchandise will come into this house, understand?”
I nodded.
She dropped her voice. “It’s important, Perse, to stay away from her, important for all of us. When you’re older, you’ll understand, okay?”
“Okay.”
I
probably would have disobeyed her, but Sister Mary Aggie stopped coming by the Block, as if, having done what she could for me, she had moved on to some other part of the Mount, some other boy. My mother, Medina and I—I had nagged them into it by telling them I was worried she was back in the Mental—went up the Curve of Bonaventure, past St. Bon’s to Sister Mary Aggie’s room on Garrison Hill. And perhaps she was back in the Mental: the pulsing red Sacred Heart was gone and there were no curtains on the window. The room looked empty, but my mother let me knock on the door anyway. No one came.
ONE YEAR’S GRACE
MY mother decided to hold me back from school until I was six, saying that “an extra year might make a lot of difference.” I knew what she meant but pretended not to. I didn’t mind staying at home. It was fun at 44, watching the weird interactions of the grown-ups and soaking up from them as much “forbidden” knowledge as I could.
“Why does everyone call him Jim Joyce?” Pops asked.
“So as not to confuse him with Joe Blow,” Medina said.
“Do you have to be so mean?” Pops snapped. He never, when directly addressing her, used her name, and only rarely used it otherwise.
“Do you have to be so nice, Pops? I’m related to Jim Joyce by an accident of birth. What’s your excuse?”
“Everyone called him Jim Joyce,” my mother said. “ ‘Jim’ was insufficient for some reason.”
Medina sniffed. “I used to ask him, ‘Jim, what would you like to be if you grow up?’ ”
“What was Jim Joyce, really?” I said. “What was his job?” My mother told me he was a brain surgeon. An admiral in the navy. A big tycoon. “Tell me the truth.”
“I’ve told you before. He was a van driver. He delivered trays of bread to corner stores.”
“Really?”
“Really. He had a wallet that was connected to his back pocket by a silver chain. He wore an olive-coloured uniform with his first name on it. Jim. The cock of the walk. He had a white undershirt and a pair of worn-out boots. But the Foreign Legion convinced him to leave all that behind.”
“The sky’s the limit on the Mainland,” Medina said. “I’m sure he’s gone on to bigger and better things. Probably drives a bigger and better bread van in some place like New York.”
“Was he smart like you?” I asked my mother.
“He was smart like me,” Medina said. “Not book smart, but smart.” She sounded contrite.
My mother sometimes used the initials D.O.D. when speaking about Jim Joyce in front of me. She went on using it long after I knew that it stood for Dear Old Dad. Pops said she shouldn’t call him D.O.D. “He’s my fiancé,” she replied, blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “He never did tell me he was breaking off our engagement. I can call him anything I want. Percy’s my son and this is my house. And you’re a boarder from the bottom of the bay. So I guess I can call D.O.D. anything I want.”
Pops always backed down when my mother spoke to him like that. He shrugged as if to say, “Fine. If you want to make fun of a man who can’t defend himself in front of his son, go ahead.”
Though she was on less than half a secretary’s salary, my mother typed almost incessantly throughout the day, in the evening after supper, on the weekends, always puffing on a cigarette, squinting through the smoke, wincing, blinking, tears running from her red-rimmed eyes. I became so accustomed to the clatter of her typewriter, the dinging of the bell, that they became like the automatic noises of the house, the noises of the furnace, the water pipes, the washer and dryer. Occasionally I would notice a change in the frequency of the dinging of the bell, which was the measure of how fast she was going. Ding, ding, ding, ding, each ding a line, the dinging and the lines accelerating as if the Remington were self-propelled, each line a few more pennies in our pockets, courtesy of Uncle Paddy. Ding, ding, ding, like coins dropped into a piggy bank.
She typed on an expansive but flimsy, thin-topped office table that wobbled more the faster she typed and always looked on the verge of collapsing and dumping the Remington into her lap. With my mother typing so fast amid so much smoke, the table looked like some sort of vehicle that she was trying to coax into motion, the typewriter like some sort of engine or steering apparatus.
“Still at the Helm, Paynelope?” Pops would quip when he came home.
“Still at it, Pops,” my mother would answer without removing her cigarette from her mouth.
“All that work and you haven’t budged an inch.”
She stayed at the Helm for hours without a break. Sometimes drops of sweat ran down her forehead and her cheeks. When she got up from her chair, the back of her dress was damp, sometimes visibly so, depending on its colour.
“Don’t you even have to stop to pee?” Medina said when she dropped by.
My mother’s typing posture was perfect, her back straight, her high-heeled shoes disposed just so on the floor. Except for the cigarette, she might have been posing for the cover of a typewriting textbook. She had been required to wear high-heeled shoes when she was learning to type and said that she didn’t feel right typing without them, even when she wore her bathrobe. When she was done for the day, she slipped out of her shoes and left them under the table. She soaked her fingertips every night in some sort of blister-preventing solution, saying that we were always one blister away from falling behind on the mortgage. “I can always tide you over, Paynelope,” Pops said, but my mother ignored him.
While my mother sat in the kitchen after dinner, a beer in front of her, Medina would stand behind her chair and massage her shoulders. “You’re nothing but knots, sweetie,” she said.
“Mmmmm,” my mother said.
DIRECTOR McHUGH
SOMETIMES, when she had no choice, my mother would leave me with Pops, telling him all sorts of things to do and not do, the latter including not to drink beer until she was back and not to take me outdoors. Pops complied, following me about the house, abstaining from beer, until one day when my mother had worked later than usual and said she could get to the grocery store and back faster if she went by herself. She had no sooner boarded the bus than Pops said, “Would you like to go across the street and visit Brother Rice? All this time it’s been just across the street, and I go there every day, but you’ve never been inside.”
“Mom said not to take me outdoors.”
“She meant not to take you too far from home. We’ll only be outdoors for a minute. Then we’ll be indoors again. And we’ll get back long before she does. We can go out just as we are.”
It was April, but there was still some snow here and there and it got quite cold after sunset. He was wearing his lab coat, I a sweater and a T-shirt. “We don’t need overcoats,” he said. “It’s just across the street.”
I had often wondered what Brother Rice was like and very much wanted to see it. I was five, so it would be nine years before I went there, but it was always there when I looked out the window, the very definition for me of the word “school,” a massive block of brick overlooking 44. I decided not to ask Pops what we would say to my mother when she got back. I knew she’d be able to tell just by looking at me and Pops that something had happened and that I would tell her exactly what before she even asked. I didn’t say so to Pops, however, in case he changed his mind.
Pops said Brother Rice was the biggest school in the province. It was the hub school that led the way in everything—sports, scholastics—and was run by the highest-ranking Christian Brother on the island. Pops said that Director McHugh was looked upon as the Christian Brothers’ equivalent of the Archbishop, which my mother said was like being looked upon as the infantryman equivalent of a four-star general.
Pops took me across the street, holding my hand, waving at motorists who honked and pedestrians who waved back. I waved and smiled as well. He led me to the front door of the school, which he unlocked with one of about a dozen keys he carried on a ring that was wound around his thumb. The vestibule was dark until Pops turned on one of the lights and a world that
was entirely new to me burst into life. The floor and the stairs that led up to the night-lit lobby were made of gleaming black marble that caused our footsteps to echo in the empty school. Pops took me by the hand. “By day you can’t hear yourself think in here, there’s such a din,” he said. “It’s hard to believe it’s the same place.” We went up the stairs and into the lobby. I gaped at the large glass-encased sports trophies that were everywhere, on free-standing pedestals, on tables against the wall. Pops flipped another light.
“Brother Rice wins just about everything,” he said. “Director McHugh makes sure of that.” He pointed to a floor-to-ceiling wooden scroll, about half of which was blank. “The honour roll,” he said with some sarcasm, pointing to the names etched into the wood. “From the year the school started up to last year. If your average is between seventy-five and eighty-five you get second class, eighty-five and up first class. Your name will be on this scroll someday, in the first-class list. When you’re old enough to go to high school. You’re probably smart enough to go now, but rules are rules. You’re going to be as smart as your mother.”
He pointed up to a large photograph of a smiling, vestment-laden old man wearing a skullcap. “The Pope. He’s in charge of the Church.”
“I know.”
“Some of the boys call me Pope Pops the First.” I laughed because I thought he wanted me to, but he frowned. “You wouldn’t believe how stupid most of these boys are. The average student is a dunce with a brain the size of a subatomic particle.” He pointed at the honour roll. “Even most of them are stupid. Why is it considered necessary for children to want to be something when they grow up? I never wanted to be anything.” He sounded as if he was living proof that childhood apathy was no deterrent to success.
“Like everything else, stupidity runs in families. When I see the family resemblance, when I see a boy whose brother or father was my student, I know exactly what to expect. There should be signs in front of houses all over the city: ‘Murphy and Sons—Makers of Idiots since 1823’; ‘Crocker and Sons—Proudly providing St. John’s with yahoos and buffoons since 1882.’ ”
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