The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  The rest of the night I couldn’t sleep for wonder of their bodies in the bed. I knew that, from now on, I would see Medina when I saw my mother, smell her mix of musk and sweat on my mother’s clothes and in her hair, the blend of their lipstick and my mother’s perfume.

  I was terrified too: I was certain that if people found out, I would be taken away from my mother. I knew of two boys who’d been taken from their parents who’d done nothing worse than drink too much. I wiped tears from my eyes with the heels of my hands. I wondered if they had heard me, even seen me, at the door. They might have heard someone and now be wondering if it was me or Pops.

  Word would quickly spread through the school and the neighbourhood about the Vat Rat that had almost made its way into our house, the frightful ingenuity of its assault upon the Joyces, its vicious determination and grisly battle to the death with our drainage pipe. Pops would tell the other teachers. My mother and Medina would tell the neighbours. And every time I overheard the neighbours talking, I would think of the wicked, illicit, inscrutable scene I had witnessed just before discovering the Vat Rat in the sump pump hole.

  At breakfast the next morning, I kept my eye on my mother, and I was far from subtle about it, though I’d warned myself not to stare at her or even Pops.

  “What are you looking at?” my mother said.

  “You,” I said.

  “I can see that. I meant why are you looking at me? Jesus, Perse, must you always be so goddamned literal?”

  I shrugged.

  At first she seemed unfazed, more concerned about me than otherwise. “Perse, you look like you didn’t sleep a wink.”

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Vat Rat,” I said.

  “The Vat Rat’s gone. Pops heroically disposed of it.”

  “Another one might try to get in the same way.”

  “It would have to be a slightly smaller or an even more determined one,” Pops said. “I had to use a screwdriver on last night’s beast. Came out in pieces—”

  “That’ll do, Pops.”

  “I feel sorry for the Vat Rat,” I said.

  “You didn’t look sorry last night,” Pops laughed. “You wouldn’t feel sorry for one if it climbed up the ladder of your bed and bit off your—”

  “Pops, will you for Christ’s sake shut up?”

  “Sorry, Paynelope.”

  “It’s not Paynelope, it’s Penelopee.”

  Pops, face and neck flushed, got up from the table and left the kitchen, mumbling something about getting his lab coat and doubting that she had ironed it for him as she was always promising she would but never did.

  My mother looked at me. “There won’t be any more Vat Rats.” It didn’t sound like reassurance so much as a warning to avoid any further mention of them. But I couldn’t help trying to get a rise out of her, to provoke her into blurting out something about last night.

  “We can’t block up the sump pump pipe”—I darted a glance at her— “the basement will flood.”

  My mother glared at me and I glared back. “What’s wrong with you this morning?” she snapped.

  I wondered if it might after all have been the Vat Rat that had so upset her. If she and Medina had seen or heard me at the bedroom door, she would have been careful not to lose her temper with Pops. I realised she didn’t know.

  In my room, I tried to mimic what I’d seen, looking at myself in the mirror, chewing and moving my head from side to side. Why did they prefer that? Why did they like it at all—Medina who had never had a boyfriend and my mother who no longer had a fiancé? I got hard at the very sight of a bare-legged girl from Mercy Convent. I’d all but go off at the sight of scores of them on Bonaventure trying to control their tunics in a gale of wind. My father’s sister and my mother. I felt certain it would never have happened if my father hadn’t run away and left us. But it also seemed like a betrayal of him in spite of what he’d done to us. And more Medina’s fault than my mother’s, who had once been engaged and had a child. I told myself Medina would do anything when she was drunk. There might be nothing more to it than that—something women did when they were drunk, and didn’t even remember afterward.

  But when I looked at my startled, wonderstruck face in the mirror, I knew that if either of them was more to blame, it was my mother, on whose every word and deed Medina hung, as if on an older sister’s.

  I supposed they didn’t have to worry much about being discovered by Pops. His bedroom was farther from my mother’s than mine was. And Pops drank six or more beers every night before he went to bed and always kept the door of his room closed after lights out. I kept my door closed as well, for there were nights when my mother and Medina noisily played cards in the kitchen until well after midnight. My mother usually left the door of her room partway open so that she’d hear me if I called out to her or needed to be consoled about a dream. She wouldn’t have left the door open on purpose when Medina was in there. In fact, she would likely have locked it; I knew her door could be locked from the inside simply by turning and pushing the knob.

  How reckless they had been. Then I thought that if they didn’t know they’d been discovered maybe they would soon be back in my mother’s bed again. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I heard my mother and Medina go to my mother’s room. If they did close and lock the door, I likely wouldn’t hear anything unless I eavesdropped just outside the room or worked up the nerve to actually put my ear against the door and risk making it rattle in its frame the way all the doors did on windy nights. Or risk being discovered in the hallway should my mother get up to go to the bathroom or to get a glass of water.

  Every night for a week afterward, I listened at the door of my room to see if I could hear the noises again. Some nights Medina would be at our house, but she would always go home before I went to bed. I would hear her leave the house, accompanied to the back porch by my mother, who loudly bade her good night and closed the door. Too loudly. A goodbye that Pops and I were meant to hear, because I didn’t know then that it had long been Medina’s habit to come back later, sneak up the steps into the house and afterward sneak out again, well before Pops got up at seven.

  ST. JOHN’S DAY, JUNE 24

  ON my tenth birthday, my mother insisted we go out walking as we had on my fourth. She and Medina and I went out in the warm rain. Her dark skin showed through her matted white blouses as if they were made of tissue paper. She looked, Medina said, as if she were wearing nothing but a bra above the waist. “So what? Women at the beach show more than me. I’d prove it if we had a way of getting to the beach.”

  In the early spring, the telephone wires had spun in the wind like long black skipping ropes, glistening with freezing rain, whirring, droning overhead as if, any second, they might snap and, spewing sparks, drop down on whatever, whomever, lay beneath them. Traffic lights and crosswalk signs hovered horizontal to the ground like bedsheets on a clothesline. If you didn’t “get” the wind, you didn’t “get” St. John’s, for its dying down was rare and far more remarkable than its seaborne assault that seemed to come at once from all points of the compass. It funnelled undeterred through the rows of houses whose windows buckled like sheet metal but somehow didn’t break. It shook even the largest of parked cars and trucks, bent aerial rods into lethal, lashing tails. I was so skinny it would have blown me over. My mother holding one of my hands, Medina the other, they let the wind lift me clear off the ground, tried to run against it, which made me rise up that much higher, flying for a few seconds, like a gull against the gale.

  There had been stains of road salt like chalk outlines on the pavement, shapes as amorphous as the one on my face. A brush cut of sod on top of a five-hundred-foot-high head of rock, that’s what the south side hills looked like. Rivers of melted snow ran down every hill, in torrents in the gutters, in wave after gentle wave down the middle of the streets; gathered in mud-coloured, slush-bobbing pools that were too wide to jump so we had no choice but to ford them as fast as we could in the vain hope of being
insulated from the icy water by our socks.

  My mother often remarked at how the weather controlled my mood. I tried not to revel in the melancholy failure of October, or give in to the urge to brood on the imminence of winter. It was not the seasons but the coming of them that I couldn’t stand, the drive of all things in the world to transform themselves, to slough off the old, to promise the smell, look, feel and sound of change. Yet my feet and hands and face persisted as absolutely as I was told my unseen soul did. I hated, therefore, all reminders of time passing—watches, clocks, calendars and radios, the sun and moon and stars, sunset and sunrise.

  As we made our way through the city on my birthday, we passed huge bronze statues of the cartoon characters of history, including the bold-looking, sword-wielding visionary John Cabot who was credited with “discovering” the site of St. John’s Harbour on June 24, 1497, but had in fact come nowhere near it, having landed on the coast of Maine five years after Columbus “discovered” America.

  My mother said that Uncle Paddy was a bit like John Cabot: “A big fish in a small pond, a small fish in a big pond, a minnow in history, a tide-tossed piece of plankton in the ocean of the world, a dust mote on its last lap of the galaxy.” But in St. John’s kitchens, she said, walls that bore his image were as numerous as blades of grass.

  “Pardon my hyperbole.”

  “It’s pardoned,” Medina said. “Whatever it is.”

  I surveyed the city that for one day each year was mine.

  I didn’t want to forever give off the Vat Rat–like smell of a festering grievance by nursing the belief that in a rightful world I would be on top.

  My mother had quoted to me from a book the night before: “When the soul of a man is born in this country, nets are flung at it to hold it back from flight. You speak to me of nationality, language and religion. I shall try to fly past those nets.” It was a quotation from a collection of quotations and she hadn’t named the author.

  I shall try to fly past those nets. I shall try to fly, he might as well have said, whoever he was. I could not simply “fly past” the desecration of my face and hands and feet.

  Nationality. Language. Religion. Add to that what you are born with and every experience of your life. “Nature and nurture,” my mother said. How could you fly past those? I asked her. I doubted it was possible. I knew of no one who had done it, not even her. What chance would I have?

  But how wonderful it would be if it was possible, my mother said, possible to salute no flag, sing no anthem, adopt no motto, pledge allegiance to no country and no cause, swear no oath, adopt no ideology, silence no voice, suppress no utterance, support no church, subscribe to no religion, abject one’s self to none of the legion of imaginary gods.

  Young Mother, My Maker. Hold me now and ever in your arms.

  THE BLESSING OF 44

  CHRISTMAS cards kept coming from the Archbishop, each containing what my mother called her “annual rebuke” from His Grace, a subtle reminder that she had still not had me baptized and was still not taking the sacraments or attending Mass on Sunday. Six such years, six such Christmas cards.

  My mother continued to help me frame my replies, making sure I did not inadvertently commit myself or both of us to complying with some adjuration of His Grace, at least one of which was included in each Christmas greeting. The Archbishop always sent the official basilica Christmas card; it bore a photograph of the Basilica on the front and one of the Archbishop on the back. I imagined an official card of my own, 44 Bonaventure on the front, me on the back, my beet-face smiling out at His Grace year after year. My mother always chose a non-religious card with what she called a “pagan” greeting for our reply, something noncommittal about the “Season” or the “Holidays.”

  Merry Christmas, Your Grace, and thank you for your Christmas card. My mother sends her holiday greetings to you as well and we both hope for your continued good health and prosperity. All the best to you from Percy and Penelope Joyce.

  My mother deflected His Grace’s invitations year after year.

  Should you and your mother attend Sunday Mass, please sit up front where I can see you. It has been years since our one and only meeting. Perhaps, in spite of my busy schedule and your mother’s, and the time you must devote to your studies, we will all three be able to meet in private again sometime. I will tell you about my younger days when I planned to be a musician and was quite an accomplished player of the clarinet! If God wills it, my dear friend Percy, it will happen. Yours in Christ, P.J. Scanlon, CJM, Archbishop of St. John’s.

  My mother’s reply, signed by me:

  Merry Christmas, Your Grace. Thank you for continuing to be of so much help to me. I promise that my mother and I will sit in the front row if we go to Sunday Mass at the Basilica. I was too young when we met to remember it now but my mother remembers it well. She says that it was very kind of you to make the time to see us and that we will meet again if we are meant to. I hope you get everything you ask for from Santa Claus, maybe a new clarinet ha, ha. Yours truly, Percy Joyce.

  As of Vatican II, in October 1962, final-year seminarians no longer served as deacons, that office having since been filled by laymen, so a delivery service had been hired to drop off and pick up my mother’s “work.”

  “Too bad, Pen,” Medina had said then, “no more young men to torture with temptation.”

  That had been a few years ago and it seemed as if Christmas cards were all that would come our way from Uncle Paddy from now on, until the Archbishop told Brother McHugh to ask Pops if our house had ever been blessed. If it hadn’t been blessed, McHugh said to Pops, the Archbishop wanted to know if my mother would like it to be blessed, not by him, as his hectic schedule would not allow it, but by one of the basilica priests, preferably Father Bill Slattery, who often said Mass on Sunday at the Brother Rice chapel.

  “Having the house blessed doesn’t commit us to anything else, does it?” my mother asked nervously. Pops was assured by McHugh that it would begin and end with Father Bill coming to the house, accompanied by an altar boy, and going unobtrusively from room to room, blessing each one with holy water. We would not be required to take part in the blessing in any way, only to witness it, which, if my mother agreed to it, would take place on the next Saturday afternoon.

  “I’d hate to turn down Uncle Paddy and risk offending him,” my mother replied. Medina announced she would not be on hand for the blessing.

  Father Bill, a young, short, chubby priest whose voice was very high-pitched, came to the house with an altar boy. Father Bill did not wear any vestments and he dressed in black—but the altar boy wore his full uniform, a scarlet soutane and a white surplice trimmed with lace, and, Brother Rice being just across the road, a pair of black and red tartan slippers. He carried a kind of metal pail that Father Bill said was called an aspersorium. It was half filled with holy water into which Father Bill dipped a baton with a perforated head: the aspergillum, he called it.

  We gathered in the hallway. “You may kneel if you wish, but it’s not required,” Father Bill instructed us, smiling as if to assure us there was no need to be afraid. Afraid of what, I wondered. Pops knelt and bowed his head. I followed the example of my mother who remained standing, head bowed, one hand gripping the other in front of her.

  Father Bill and the boy went only as far as the doorway of each room and the top of the basement stairs, the two of them reciting a prayer as Father Bill, his arm upraised, sprinkled holy water everywhere with an emphatic, practised snap of the wrist, a technique that might have been Vatican prescribed, he did it with such authority. The water went a long way. It spattered across the bed in which my mother and Medina had been entwined the night I touched the door. Drops landed on my bunk beneath the pictures of Saint Drogo, on the blankets beneath which, fuelled by the memory of my mother and my aunt, I had worked my way to a foaming frenzy every night for months.

  In each room, Father Bill recited: “Visit this house, we beg Thee, Lord, and banish from it the dead
ly power of the Evil One. May the holy angels dwell here to keep us in peace and may Thy blessings be always upon us, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Pops intoned “Amen” each time Father Bill and the boy finished the prayer. It was all over in just a few minutes. As they were leaving, Pops gave Father Bill ten dollars, the “remuneration” that McHugh had told him was expected and that Father Bill, without acknowledgement, slipped swiftly into his jacket pocket.

  Medina came by to hear my mother describe what had happened. My mother told her she thought that Father Bill should have given us a piece of paper certifying that the house was blessed and setting out the terms of the warranty, such as how long the blessing was guaranteed to keep the Evil One away. All evening long, Medina called Pops the Evil One and Pops said he was surprised she hadn’t turned into a puff of smoke the second she set foot inside the house. He teased her that she had waited until the blessing was over to come visit because although it might be true that she was not religious she was certainly superstitious and probably believed in ghosts and was afraid of priests. Medina retorted that he was a hypocrite for kneeling as if he was religious.

  “I knelt to keep you in cigarettes,” Pops fired back.

  At St. Bon’s, I told the other boys that the Archbishop himself had come to 44 to bless the house. None of them had witnessed, or even heard of, the blessing of a house; my mother told me later that it was not likely most houses on the Mount had been blessed, or perhaps they had been blessed too long ago for the boys who lived in them to remember it. I told them that the Archbishop had been assisted by two priests and four altar boys and that he had sprinkled so much holy water that, by the time he left, almost every inch of 44 was drenched. I told them that my mother had asked the Archbishop to bless the house because we had always known that it was haunted: the lights, the TV, the radio and the stove sometimes came on by themselves in the middle of the afternoon. My mother set the table for breakfast each night before she went to bed and sometimes got up in the morning to find that all the dishes had been put back in the cupboards and the knives and forks and spoons were back in the drawers, which were left open. I told them that the Archbishop usually just sent a priest to bless a house but he knew that our house was “too far gone” for just a priest. He said he wasn’t even sure that he could do the job, but he did.