The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  I had the most rapt audience ever for my lies. Other boys tried to get attention with stories of how their own houses were haunted, but my story had too much detail. The focus always returned to me.

  Still, there were skeptics. Had we seen any ghosts? No. Then how did the Archbishop know they were gone? I said things had happened, which the Archbishop said were signs that the ghosts were leaving: the curtains on an open window blew out instead of in, as if someone was climbing out the window … we heard footsteps in an empty room … and the fire in the chimney suddenly went out.…

  Complaints were made to Brother McHugh by parents whose boys had come home worried that their houses were haunted. Word quickly got round St. Bon’s that the Archbishop had never been at 44 but had merely sent Father Bill there for a routine, uneventful blessing. And just as they had resented the Joyce boy for being favoured with a Sermon on the Mount, some people in the neighbourhood wondered why the Archbishop himself had asked that our house be blessed, especially as we didn’t even go to church and I had yet to be baptized—and many of their houses had yet to be blessed. Father Bill was soon collecting house-blessing fees at the rate of two or three per weekend. Boys at school repeated to me things they’d overheard their parents saying: The Joyces are practically Protestants, so why is the Archbishop paying special attention to them? You shouldn’t even be allowed to have your house blessed if you don’t believe in God. Someone should tell the Archbishop that the Joyces are taking advantage of him. How much trouble does the Joyce boy have to cause before he gets what he deserves?

  But I stuck to my story. I remembered every word of Father Bill’s prayer but amended it to suit my audience, retaining only “Banish from this house the deadly power of the Evil One,” which I followed with: “Don’t let the Devil get away with anything. Please punish him severely forever and ever. He’s not afraid of anyone but Thee because Thou always was and knoweth where he lives. Kick him out of this house, O Lord. Make him think twice about coming back, and try to keep him from setting up shop in the other houses on the Mount. Don’t let him touch the dishes or turn on the stove. Make him leave the lights alone. We beg Thee, Lord, and Thy Holy Angels, don’t let him change the channel on the TV or the radio and keep him away from Percy, who is not baptized, forever and ever. Amen.”

  I said that blessing a house was like baptizing it, so at least the house I lived in was baptized. I told the boys it meant that if I died in the house, my soul would go to Heaven, but if I died outdoors, I would go to Hell. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I died in the driveway or the yard—maybe I would go to Limbo or Purgatory. I said these things to boys from whom I had gleaned what little knowledge of Catholicism I had acquired by eavesdropping on their conversations or asking them outright what the “rules” of Catholicism were, and then freely embellishing. I said I wasn’t baptized because a child couldn’t get baptized until his parents were married to each other, so I might be damned for all eternity because my father ran away before the wedding. As no one was even sure he was alive, I might already be a hopeless case. I said my mother and I had often been for drives in the Archbishop’s limousine. He often had us over to his house to watch TV. We drank Pepsi with ice cubes made from holy water. I said he and my mother talked on the phone a lot, sometimes about me, sometimes about other people in the neighbourhood, but I was not allowed to say whom. They talked for hours sometimes because the Archbishop was always looking for advice from my mother about what to do with the troublemaking families on the Mount. I said that I talked to him too, but only for a little while. He’d told me he’d have a dog if it wasn’t against the rules. And maybe a swimming pool. For an archbishop, there was a rule against almost everything. He said his job was pretty good, better than when he was just a priest. His name was P.J. Scanlon and P.J. were my initials, so we sometimes called each other P.J., but we weren’t allowed to do it when other people were around.

  “The Archbishop doesn’t live in a house, he lives in the Basilica,” one boy scornfully said. I knew he was wrong, but I merely shrugged as if for him to persist in his ignorance was fine with me. I made only claims that, however absurd, could not be absolutely proved or disproved. I got the goat of many, especially when they saw that the others were unsure if I was lying, or how much I was lying. Then I showed them my basilica Christmas cards personalized by the Archbishop: this silenced even the most derisive skeptic for a while.

  PERCY AND FRANCINE

  POPS came home from Brother Rice with a note he said was from Brother McHugh. It was printed, not cursively written, and was unsigned: “I don’t care how you do it, Miss Joyce, but shut up that son of yours before someone else does.”

  My mother waved the note in Pops’ face. “This is a threat,” she said. “He’s threatening Percy.”

  “You can’t prove McHugh wrote that note.”

  “You said he gave it to you.”

  “Yes. But I’ll never say it to anyone else.”

  My mother said I didn’t lie to other children to cheat them out of anything or to convince them to misbehave, and at this point almost no one believed my lies or even wondered if they might be true. Other children were so entertained by my lies, she pointed out, that they asked me questions in the hope I would answer with lies. But Pops said McHugh had told him that His Grace believed it demeaned and even blasphemed the Church to invent or modify its doctrine, no matter how transparently untrue and intended to entertain and draw attention to myself my statements were. His Grace felt that I was abusing his patronage, doing things I knew I could get away with only because he was my long-time advocate and protector.

  I knew why I felt compelled to make things up, but that made the compulsion no easier to resist. I wanted to be known as the Joyce boy for reasons other than my face, my hands and my feet. I wanted to pre-empt teasing, head off my tormentors with the promise of information that was of the sort that grown-ups kept from children; I wanted other children to think that somehow I was privy to things that were kept from them; I wanted to have some power over others to make up for the power that even the least of them had over me. But most of all, it was fun to be impressively, precociously authoritative, whether others found me completely convincing or saw through me for the mythomaniac I was.

  It was the year I turned twelve and I was still hoping my life would change. Tick. Tock.

  So for the first time on my way up to St. Bon’s I fell in beside any girl my age whom I saw walking alone. I knew it was pointless to approach two or more girls, because one of them would never take the risk of seeming amused or charmed by me in front of the others. As it was, a good number of lone girls ran away or started screaming when I approached them. One older girl from Holy Heart didn’t. She had long blond hair and a perfect complexion—her name was Abigail. “I’m Percy Joyce,” I said.

  “Really?” she said. “I thought you were Paul Newman.”

  “A lot of people make that mistake,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe how many people ask me for my autograph. I started saying no years ago. I had to draw the line somewhere. Seriously, though, I pity Paul Newman, all those women chasing after him. He doesn’t have my coping skills, so it really gets him down.”

  “I suppose you’re pen pals. You’re so full of shit.”

  “What’s your name? It’s Abigail, right?”

  “Do you always ask the name of someone who tells you you’re full of shit?”

  “No one’s ever told me I was full of shit before.”

  “Look, I hear you’re pretty smart, so get this into your head. I don’t want to be your girlfriend, or your friend who just happens to be a girl, or your pal, or the girl who tolerates your company or pities you and keeps you around as some kind of errand boy. So point your fucked-up grade six face at someone else, keep your fucked-up hands away from me, and make sure your fucked-up feet never wind up on this side of the street again. Got it?”

  “Okay. But you’ll be sorry. I can be really nice once you get to blow me.” It w
as something I had heard an older boy say to a girl who seemed to find it funny.

  “I said, FUCK OFF.”

  Word of this encounter got back to McHugh.

  “ ‘I can be really nice once you get to blow me’?” my mother said. “You really said that? Jesus, Percy.”

  “I would have laughed,” Medina said, winking at me.

  “She certainly didn’t have to be so mean,” my mother allowed. “And it’s not as if her choice of words was any better than yours.”

  But at that age I thought words had become my weapons, my friends. I aped not just other boys, but my mother. I told different kinds of lies to grown-ups, ones they were meant to know right away were lies but that were also meant to mock the incredulity or shock they showed at the first sight of me. I said to a Mrs. Henley whom I caught staring at me one day in Collins’s store: “The woods used to be full of creatures like me, but they put a bounty on us, so most of us are gone. I’m the only one so far to survive in captivity. I still get shot at, but not as much as I used to. I have the knack of knowing when to duck. I don’t mind it when you stare at me. My own mother makes fun of me. She says I have a face that looks like the eagle-ravaged liver of Prometheus.”

  “Don’t you complain about how God made you. He knew what He was doing. He had a purpose.”

  “What was it?”

  “No one knows but God. You’re part of the Grand Plan He has for all of us.”

  “The same plan you’re part of?”

  “Yes. We all play different parts in the same plan. But we’ll all be equal when we’re in Heaven.”

  “So, when they roll the credits of history, I’ll be way down near the bottom. Across from ‘Freak of Nature Number 1197,’ it will say ‘Percy Joyce.’ But in Heaven everyone will get top billing. Everyone’s name will fit on one giant marquee.”

  “That’s just self-pity talking. And blasphemy. There are worse-off people in the world than you, Percy Joyce.”

  “It’s my fault. I guess bobbing for apples in boiling oil wasn’t such a good idea. It’s strange that an all-knowing, all-powerful God couldn’t think of a way of getting you into Heaven that didn’t involve giving me a purple face.”

  “Don’t you blame that face of yours on me, Percy Joyce!”

  That evening, Pops came back with a plan for my future. “His Grace doesn’t think this is about lying, not really, although McHugh disagrees with him. His Grace says this is about Percy not fitting in.” Pops looked at me. “He’s not saying it’s your fault, Percy. He just says that, so far, we’ve only helped you indirectly and he thinks it’s time for a more direct approach. He has offered to write or talk or whatever to some mother on the Mount whose son or daughter is your age or close to it. His Grace says he could ask her to ask her child to set an example for the other students by not making fun of you but instead spending time with you now and then.”

  “Does Percy really need Uncle Paddy to find him a friend?” my mother asked.

  “It’s just to get him started. He won’t be appointing friends of the month for Percy or anything like that.”

  “What do you think, Perse?”

  I affected a neutral, almost indifferent shrug, as if I were resigned to never being more than a joke among the children of the Mount. What I thought was that it would be a great idea, but only if my conscripted friend turned out to be a girl.

  “Wouldn’t it make sense for this first friend to be a boy?” my mother said. Pops looked at the floor. “Out with it, Pops,” my mother demanded. Pops admitted that His Grace had had no luck in finding a boy who was both acceptable for and agreeable to the task. I suspected agreeability was the bigger problem. The implication that he was somehow compatible with Percy Joyce would make any boy the laughingstock of the Mount, whereas an especially self-assured girl might be able to face down whatever mockery came her way for spending time with me. I was euphoric.

  Brother McHugh told Pops that His Grace had contacted Patricia—Pat—Dunne, one of whose older sons was a priest who was hoping to be installed close to home at the Basilica. Mrs. Dunne came from a family of long-standing Church service and devotion. Her daughter, Francine, was two years older than me, a grade ten student at Holy Heart. Mrs. Dunne had spoken to Francine about the Archbishop’s suggestion and Francine had agreed to conspicuously “befriend” me. We were to meet the next day at the corner of Howley and Bonaventure, directly across from Holy Heart. Despite this being her first year at Holy Heart, Francine, who had been class president at Mercy, was on the student council and serving as treasurer, and was active in many school clubs and associations. She was said to be looked up to by the girls of Mercy and Presentation and was a member of the Holy Heart/Brother Rice coed choir, an approachable but sensible girl who wasn’t swayed by the opinions and pastimes of her peers.

  Through her younger brother, who attended St. Bon’s, she had come to meet many of the boys. McHugh said she had “readily agreed” when her mother passed on to her the Archbishop’s request. Sister Celestine, the principal of Holy Heart, had said she also agreed with His Grace’s estimation that Francine would help me to fit in with the right sort of students and send a signal to the rest that I was no longer interested in “running with the pack of savages to whom I was merely something they could toy with when they were bored.”

  “Francine has not agreed to be your girlfriend or anything like that, understand?” my mother said. I nodded. “And you are not to say a word to her about Pops and me, understand?”

  “Yes!”

  After school the next day, I walked from St. Bon’s to the corner of Howley and Bonaventure. I had never heard of Francine Dunne and couldn’t remember ever having seen the girl who was waiting for me on the corner. There were many girls from Holy Heart milling about, all dressed in the Heart uniform, but none of them was more obviously, more intently waiting than the girl who stood motionless, looking at the ground. She had long orange hair and a pale, many-freckled face and she clasped her books against her chest as if she was afraid they might be stolen from her. I didn’t think she saw me approach her, but she spoke before I did.

  “Mom says you’re supposed to walk home with me.” She was sullen-faced, shaking her head as she spoke as if she were repeating to a friend some instruction that even coming from her mother seemed ridiculous.

  “Hello,” I said, “I’m Percy Joyce.” She didn’t reply. “And you’re Francine Dunne,” I declared before she could follow Abigail’s example and say she had mistaken me for Paul Newman. “It’s nice to meet you.” She looked about as though, unable to see me, she couldn’t account for the voice she could hear. I felt panicked. I didn’t know what to say next. I began my “give me myth or give me death” routine. I asked Francine if she had ever met the Archbishop. When she didn’t answer, I said my mother had known him since before he became a priest, back when he was one of the best clarinet players in the country. I said he played a lot of other instruments and my mother had taken music lessons from him when she was six. I said that back then he had a show-business name, Chester Walker, so a lot of people didn’t know how he started out. I said he still played the clarinet but only when he was by himself, at night in his room in the Basilica. Sometimes, I said, if you walked past the Basilica after dark, you could hear the clarinet music coming through the highest windows. It wasn’t a sin for archbishops to play musical instruments, I said, but the Vatican discouraged it because it gave people the idea that archbishops would rather be musicians and have their own orchestras and admire men like Benny Goodman more than God. “I’m sure your mother knows the Archbishop pretty well,” I said. “I don’t think he would have called her if he didn’t know her.”

  The driver of a car going by blew his horn and waved at us. Francine sighed and began to walk, fast. I asked her if she’d ever been strapped. She gripped her books tighter. I said I had never been strapped and never would be unless the Archbishop was replaced. I thought of my mother’s and Medina’s tits. I wondered if Franci
ne’s tits were bigger than they seemed because they were squashed flat by her books. I told myself that, had she not been holding the books, I would have tried to hold her hand, but I knew I didn’t dare. I knew she’d pull it away before I even had time to see what it felt like. Her hands were not full of scrapes and cat scratches and chafed and chapped like those of other girls. They were pale, delicate-looking, small hands with thin, slender fingers.

  “Nice boyfriend, Francine,” a small girl shouted. “But I think his pants should be on the upper half.”

  Francine’s shoulders rose and fell with a sigh of exasperation.

  “Shut up,” I shouted.

  “Don’t start anything,” Francine said under her breath, her lips as tightly closed as any ventriloquist’s.

  “Leave them alone, Gloria,” another older girl shouted. In the silence that followed, I realized that Francine’s mission was common knowledge, that the girls of Heart had been charged by someone, probably Sister Celestine, to let Francine do the bidding of His Grace without interference. I noticed, on the periphery of the clutch of girls from Heart, boys from St. Bon’s watching in silence, boys who at the sight of a girl tolerating my near presence, a girl, in fact, talking to me would normally have sent up a series of whoops and howls that would have brought the other students of the Mount running from all directions. Clearly, word of Francine’s mission had gone out among all the schools, word that, at the behest of His Grace, who would not look kindly on any form of defiance of his wishes, Francine and Percy Joyce would either be left alone or be joined by others who, guided by Francine’s example, would take a sincere interest in getting to know me.