To the right of the scroll, the walls were made of glass. “Principal’s Office,” a sign on the door read, and below that, “Director G.M. McHugh,” followed by a long line of initials, commas and periods. I dimly made out a desk behind the glass.
“Sometimes Director McHugh works late,” Pops murmured. “Even in the summer, but not tonight.”
“Where’s your office?” I asked.
“I guess the chem lab’s my office,” Pops sniffed. “McHugh has the only real office.”
He led me to the right, down a long dark hallway flanked by rows of lockers. About the midpoint of the hallway, there was a gap on the left side. A short flight of stairs led down to a windowless, heavy-looking black door that bore no plate or words.
“That door leads to the tunnel that leads to the Brothers’ Quarters,” Pops said, “where they live and sleep. I see them coming and going by that door, but I’ve never been inside the tunnel. The boys McHugh straps are taken to him through the tunnels.” I had an image of the Brothers living underground in a catacomb-like maze of torchlit cells, a dungeon-dim place from which they emerged each morning to join the throng of boys in the hallway. And another image of a boy being “taken to” McHugh through the tunnels like a condemned prisoner.
Pops said they had rooms with a toilet and sink but no bath or shower. There was a shared shower like the one used by students after gym class. The Christian Brothers took vows of poverty and chastity. They could drink and smoke but only in their quarters; most did both, though it was said that Director McHugh, who had a suite of rooms and his own shower, did neither.
A beer truck filled to the brim pulled up to the back of the Brothers’ Quarters every Friday afternoon at four and was empty when it left. “No one begrudges them a beer and a smoke,” Pops said. “It’s not as if they have much else. I suppose I live much like they do, even to the point of having just a room to myself which is within feet of the school where I teach.”
He showed me the cafeteria. “The Brothers call it the Mess Hall. I call it the Trough. The boys snuffle through their lunches like a herd of swine.”
We went to the gym. As he turned on each light, there was a thudding sound and then a loud buzzing that echoed from wall to wall. “Basketball, volleyball,” he muttered, surveying the gym from the doorway. “I never heard of them when I was growing up. I still don’t know what the rules are. Don’t want to know. All we had to skate on was a frozen pond.”
He showed me the little library, the tiny music room. He saved the chem lab, which was just outside the gym, for last. He unlocked the door, which had one narrow rectangular window criss-crossed with wire. When he switched the lights on, we faced a raised dais with a desk and chair on top of it, books, papers and pens scattered about the desk.
“My throne, you might say. It can be Percy’s throne for now. Sit in the chair.” A makeshift set of wooden steps led up to the level of the desk. I climbed up, sat in the chair and looked out across horizontally arranged rows of countertops and sinks.
“Lab stations,” he said. “Each one has a gas valve. The last thing I do every day is make sure that all of them have been turned off. So I sit up there and preside over the boys as they conduct experiments that I assign. Everyone, including me, wears safety goggles. Someone always blows something up. The boys also call me Mr. Clean because I dress in this white lab coat. I believe some irony is intended, because my coat is never clean—there are stains which will never come out. But attributing irony to that tribe of trilobites may be giving them too much credit. I see it all from where you’re sitting, Percy, row upon row of nose-picking, cretinous, never-to-evolve baboons, and here and there among them a star—a star because the number of letters in some of the words he says exceeds four and because he doesn’t always join in when the other boys light up wind from their behinds with Bunsen burners.” Pops’ room at home, which I caught only occasional glimpses of through his partly open door, was full of chemistry “props,” likely one of everything that was in his lab: a petri dish for growing what he called “baketerial cultures,” a Bunsen burner, a broken microscope, a beaker, a pipette, a large brown bottle stoppered with a cork.
He fell silent and put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, his thumbs outside. “Does your mother ever mention me, Percy?” He dropped his chin onto his chest as if he had fallen asleep.
“What do you mean?”
“Has she ever said, I don’t know, something nice or something bad about me when I wasn’t around?”
“Sometimes. But she’s just joking with Medina. They joke about everyone. They joke about me.”
“Yes, I know—I’m sure it’s all in fun, but your mother, she never mentions me to you, when the other one is not around I mean?”
“I guess so. I’m not sure.”
“So—she’s never taken you aside to tell you something about me?”
“Like a secret?”
“Something like one, I suppose. You tell me. What does she say?”
“She never tells me secrets.”
“That’s why they’re secrets, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
“Does she ever speak about Medina when I’m not around?”
“Not really.”
“They’re as thick as thieves, the two of them. If you ever hear anything that sounds like a secret, let me know. We’re the men of the house. We have to stick together, right?”
“I suppose.”
“All right. Well, never mind. Don’t tell them I asked you any questions. Okay? That can be our secret.”
“Okay.”
“Here”—Pops reached into the desk drawer and took out a pair of safety goggles—“put these on.” He helped me, adjusting the back strap until it was tight. Then he put on his own. “You’re goggle-eyed. Look at your reflection in the window.” I looked like a snorkeller who had lost his breathing tube. “You look funny too,” I said, and we both laughed.
Next he took out what he called “a model of a molecule,” balls of various colours connected by wooden pegs. “This is a good one,” he said, “magnesium tetra dioxide.” He handed it to me. “You can keep it,” he said. “There are no labs in junior school, but you’ll take chemistry when you get to grade ten. Probably from me.” I thought of it, being taught chemistry at school by Pops who boarded with us. “Do you like the molecule?” he asked. “Yes, thanks.” But I wasn’t sure what to do with it. “You can make different shapes with it,” he said. “Different molecules. The sticks are the bonds that hold the atoms together. A bundle of atoms makes up a molecule. Atoms and molecules are too small for us to see. But they are what we are made of, nothing else.”
“Medina said that invisible atoms are going for sixty cents a bundle at the grocery store.”
“Ignorance. Blissful ignorance. And this from a woman who works in a hospital surrounded by science. Her knowledge of science, her notion of how things work, is on a par with that of some raw-meat-eating savage from the paleolithic age. We are millions of molecules, Percy. That’s all we are. One person”—he pointed at me—“gets a big mind. Another, like Medina, gets a small mind. You deserve no credit. She deserves no blame. We are what matter made us, and that cannot be planned or changed. Atoms don’t bind because they love each other or even because they hate each other. Or even because of animal attraction. They bind because of inanimate attraction. Like magnets. Medina, being single and having no chance of ever being otherwise, is a non-binding entity. Subatomic. Sub everything. You know—”
The lab door opened and in walked Director McHugh. I had never seen him before, but I had no doubt that it was him. Had he been wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, he could easily have been mistaken, in spite of his frock, for a priest. He had the deliberate, authoritative air of one, of a man who could say Mass, administer the sacraments, forgive sins or withhold forgiveness, marry people, perform last rites. But a Christian Brother, even the Christian Brother, could do none of these. He could only teach and preside o
ver other Brothers, other teachers. Yet he had the air of someone accustomed to having his arrival received with silence, someone whose entrance interrupted conversation and commanded the attention of all who were in the room. He wore a pin identifying him as Director G.M. McHugh. His hair was longer than that of any of the other Brothers, thick and white. It made him look younger than his eyes and his complexion told me he must be.
I laid the model molecule on the desk.
“Director McHugh!” Pops gasped, extending his arms to me and hastily lifting me down from the dais, removing my safety goggles then his own, and standing me square in front of McHugh, whom I expected to crouch down to my height or put his hands on my shoulders as other grown-ups did.
“I didn’t see you in your office,” Pops said, “or I would have stopped by. I was just showing Percy where I work.” He was so nervous he all but swallowed the last half of the sentence.
“No harm done,” McHugh said, leaving me to wonder if, when we arrived, he had been in his office, in the dark, looking out at us, knowing we could not see him.
“He’ll be a pupil here one day.” He spoke in a sonorous, modulated voice.
“Yes, that’s right,” Pops said. “I thought we could spare one of our model molecules, so I gave him one. It’s right there on the desk—as a souvenir—”
“A memento,” McHugh said, “to remind him of the day when he’ll return.”
“Exactly,” Pops said. “Percy, this is Director McHugh.”
“Hello, Brother,” I said, uncertain if I should have said “director.” I looked up at him. He said nothing. Slowly, very slowly chewing gum with his front teeth, his pursed lips moving slightly as if he was contemplating some difficult decision, he faintly, appraisingly, smiled. Gum, I would learn in time, was his only “vice.”
“So this is the little Joyce boy who won’t be starting school until he’s six,” he said, putting his index finger under my chin and raising my face, which he examined at length, his eyes moving slowly about as if he was memorizing my every feature. My heart thumped and I felt myself deeply flushing from head to toe, stained and unstained parts alike. My arms at my sides, I was barely able to resist turning my face away. I suspected that I had last been as closely scrutinized by a doctor as an infant. I felt that my self-consciousness was for the first time being entirely discounted, as if Brother McHugh had a purpose for thus examining me that overrode any considerations of embarrassment or privacy. He might well have been a doctor who was judging how well the face on which he had recently operated was healing, staring at me as if he had just removed a set of bandages. “Hmm,” he said, lowering his hand but looking me straight in the eye. His eyes were blue, as blue as the sky on a cold winter’s day. “Little Percy, Little Percy. It’s not all that bad, is it, Vice-Principal MacDougal, not as bad as His Grace thinks it is and Little Percy and his mother like to think it is. And his hands and his feet, they don’t seem so oversized to me. Lobster-coloured hands. Not the worst fate in the world.”
“Oh no, it’s not all that bad. Percy has grown used to his— I think— It’s just a question—”
“Be certain that every door is locked before you leave, Vice-Principal MacDougal,” McHugh said, turning away from us and walking out without closing the chem lab door behind him. He had not once addressed me directly, not with a single word, but had only spoken of me to Pops as if I were inanimate, insensate. He had not even asked me a single question of the sort that the few other clerics I had met had asked, simple questions that more or less instructed you how to answer them, such as “Do you like ice cream?” or “You live at 44, don’t you?”
Pops, averting his eyes, put the goggles away. I heard McHugh’s receding footsteps, then a door opening and closing.
“He’s gone into the tunnel,” Pops said. “At least, I think he has. I suppose he wasn’t following us around the whole time. I hope he didn’t hear any of those things I said about the boys. Some Rice boys come from very influential families. Lawyers, doctors, judges, politicians. How they rose to influence God only knows, because they’re as thick as their children.”
“I think we should go home,” I said. “It’s pretty dark outside. It must be late.”
Pops looked at his watch. “Christ,” he said. “Paynelope must be back by now. She’ll be worried sick. And angry.” I hurried after Pops as he turned off all the lights and checked that all the doors were locked. “She’s going to hang me,” Pops said, fidgeting wildly with the keys as he tried to lock the door to the cafeteria.
We ran hand in hand across Bonaventure in the dark, me with my model molecule in my free hand. There were lights on in the house, but there had been lights on when we left, so I wasn’t sure if my mother was home. Pops was just about to turn the doorknob when my mother yanked open the door.
“Thank God,” she gasped. “Where have you been? I’ve been going half out of my mind with worry.”
“You knew he was with me,” Pops said.
“How could I know anything? I come home and find the house empty, the door unlocked. I didn’t know what to think. Why didn’t you leave a goddamn note? And even if I’d been sure he was with you, Pops, what comfort would that have been? Oh, he’s with Pops, then nothing could possibly be wrong. You better have a good reason for going outside with Percy, Pops. What was the emergency? Because if there was anything less than one, you’re in big trouble.”
“I took him to see Brother Rice,” Pops said.
“Why?”
“Because he’s never been inside there in his life.”
“Neither have I and I still somehow manage to make it from one day to the next. What do you have there, Percy?”
“A model of a molecule,” I said. “Pops gave it to me when we were in the chemistry lab.”
She pulled me away from him and told me to go to my room. I did as she said but then crept back out and watched from the hallway, to which my mother’s back was turned.
“You were counting on getting back here before me and me coming home to find that the deed was done, that Percy was safe and content and eager to tell me all about his field trip to Brother Rice, and that because he’d had such a good time, I wouldn’t have the heart to spoil things for him by getting upset with you.”
“I’m sorry. I should have asked for your permission.”
“You didn’t ask because you knew you wouldn’t get it.”
“You make it sound as if I had some ulterior motive for wanting to show Percy Brother Rice. I wanted him to see where I go every day, where I work, that’s all.”
“You will never worm your way into this family. Remember that. You stay here on certain terms. Don’t try to change them. I allow you certain privileges. Don’t try to expand upon them.”
“I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t do that.”
“So what was it like, your field trip to Brother Rice?”
“We met McHugh.”
“You mean you took him to meet McHugh.”
“No. We were in the chem lab. McHugh just walked in.”
“Percy!” my mother shouted. I went out to the kitchen.
“So you met the mighty McHugh?”
I nodded.
“What was that like?”
“He touched my face.”
“What? How?”
When I showed her, she glared at Pops. “What did he say, Pops? Did he touch Percy’s hands too?”
“No. He just said it—the stain on Percy’s face—he said it didn’t look so bad.”
“Is that what he said, Percy?”
I nodded. “He said it didn’t look as bad as we thought it was, you and me and Uncle Paddy. He didn’t really say it to me, he said it to Pops. He didn’t really say anything to me. He called me Little Percy.”
My mother stood closer to Pops, her face about an inch from his.
“What happened, Pops?”
“It’s just as Percy says.”
“Little Percy. Whose face McHugh thinks he’s free to do w
ith as he pleases, touch it, size it up. Jesus.”
“I didn’t know he’d be there,” Pops said.
“I’m sure you didn’t. Are you all right, Percy?”
I nodded. I shook my head when she asked if I’d been scared. I thought of describing how I’d felt but couldn’t find the words. I thought of the feel of McHugh’s finger on my chin.
“Holy cards and curses from Sister Mary Aggie. McHugh sizing him up as if he were a horse. What next? What did you say, Pops, when McHugh said that Percy’s face didn’t look so bad?”
“I agreed with him. I don’t think it looks that bad. I tried to tell McHugh it was a question of how Percy would be treated by the other boys—”
“You said it wasn’t that bad? Is there anything McHugh could have said that you wouldn’t have agreed with?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Have you been drinking?” my mother said.
“No,” Pops said.
“Then what’s your excuse?”
“I told you. I asked him if he’d like to see the chem lab.”
“You asked him? Since when do you ask him? I told you not to take him outdoors. Now listen to me, Pops. There is no ‘Pops and Percy,’ do you understand? Pops and Percy do not walk hand in hand across Bonaventure. They do not appear in public together, even with me. There is Miss Joyce and Percy Joyce. People do not say ‘There go Pops and Percy.’ Miss Joyce and Percy Joyce, Penny and Percy, fine. But Pops is not in the picture. There is no Pops and Percy, there is no Pops and Penny. Do you and I go out in public? No. People do not say ‘There go Pops and Penny.’ ”
“No, they say ‘There go Percy and the two Miss Joyces.’ ”
“Leave Medina out of this. You are our boarder. Not our avuncular boarder. Not our good-with-children boarder. Not our pitches-in-to-help-when-he-can boarder. Not our almost-like-one-of-the-family boarder. Not our unexpected boon of a boarder. Not our godsend-to-the-Joyces boarder. I do not need you and Percy skipping back and forth to Brother Rice in front of everyone. You are our boarder, the Joyces’ boarder. Otherwise, you are Pops, period. And if from now on you so much as take Percy out on the steps, you will be known as the Joyces’ former boarder. The erstwhile boarder. The long-since-replaced boarder. The boarder in search of a new situation. The boarder more abruptly expelled than any other in the history of room and board. The boarder in search of a forwarding address. The boarder they call Mariah—like the wind.”
The Son of a Certain Woman Page 8
