The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

“You don’t have to. I know I will. You won’t promise because you’re afraid you’ll break your promise.”

  “No. That’s not it.”

  “Then promise.”

  “I don’t know why you’re doing this, Percy. It’s not just the boys at school, is it? A promise is not a guarantee, you know. Not always.”

  “Well, maybe someday you could help me get a girlfriend. You could promise me you’ll try. Not like you did with Francine Dunne.”

  “Percy, I don’t know what to say. How would I go about trying? When or where would I start?”

  “You figured out how to get Pops to pay the rent—”

  “That’s enough. Stop. All right, I’ll do everything I can, when the time comes, but I’ll have to think about it first. This is something that sooner or later you’ll have to do for yourself, just like everybody else.”

  “I know. But I’m talking about now—”

  “You said you weren’t talking about now.”

  “Never mind, never mind, never mind,” I yelled. I stomped to the door of my room. Before I went inside, I looked back at her. Her book was closed on her lap, her head leaned back against the sofa, her eyes closed, her cheeks puffed out. She exhaled audibly and shook her head ever so slightly.

  A few days later, my mother, wearing her bathrobe, came into my room after I’d gone to bed. She stood by my upper bunk, her hands behind her back.

  “I assume you’ve never seen a naked woman. A real one or a picture of one?”

  I shook my head. My heart pounded. I thought she was about to undo the belt and let the robe fall to the floor.

  “I’ll bring you home a picture of one. You can keep it. Give her a name and promise her you’ll never be inspired by anyone but her.”

  “A picture of one? Can’t you just undo your robe and let me look? Just for a minute. I won’t move. When I was a baby, I must have seen you stark naked all the time, but now I’m too old?”

  “Jesus Christ. Yes, you’re too old. You’re my son. Stop trying to seduce me.”

  She wouldn’t say where she found the glossy, colour, full-page picture she brought home. She left it on my pillow with a note paper-clipped to it: “Hold her tight and treat her right. Call her Tina. T-I-N-A—Stands for Tits ’n’ Ass. Call her anything you like. Just don’t call her Francine. She wasn’t easy to get, so make her last.”

  I taped her to the wall beside my pillow in the upper bunk. The woman in the picture did indeed bare all—hence my decision not to call her Tina. Arms over her head, legs splayed, lying slightly on one side to show her bum, she had the kind of face that my mother said later was known as “bland blond,” but it seemed anything but bland to me. Her vagina looked like something that had been revealed by expert surgery, pink layers and folds surrounded by more hair than I had ever imagined down there. I told my mother that I’d call her Vivian after a girl from the Mercy Convent I had long lusted after and longed for from afar. But I thought of her as Francine, Francine sublimated into this bland and naked, blond, grown woman.

  I couldn’t imagine that, where boys were concerned, girls might be generous, receptive, that there was a kind of game going on between boys and girls that wasn’t all that easy to play and that, unless both sides did their part, would fail. I assumed that girls held on to everything they had—words, lips, sex—and that it was the boys’ job to take those things away. I suppose that I was a little in love with Francine in spite of everything. I thought of how her legs looked, pink with cold, when, in the mornings, right in front of Heart, she pulled her slacks down from her tunic. I imagined us getting secretly engaged, then having to break it off because her parents disapproved of me. I imagined no great anguish, no heart-rending goodbyes, only silent suffering. I imagined saving her from gangs of boys like Moyles. I hurled myself in front of a car to knock her out of the way. And I imagined meetings, the two of us, sensitive loners, meeting, walking after dark behind St. Bon’s, unaware of one another and then somehow colliding and falling together into snowdrifts, kissing, holding hands, each discovering that, after all, there was someone just like us. So there was that Francine.

  But there were the two other Francines too, the real one who scorned me and the one on the wall. I never could quite reconcile the three of them. They were like the Holy Trinity of Francine, joined but separate, individual but seamlessly linked, co-equal and co-eternal. At first, I much preferred to look at “Francine’s” face whenever I was, as my mother put it, “answering the call.” But I moved on from there.

  When Pops or Medina asked where I was, my mother said, “He’s in his room, answering the call of Vivian.” Sometimes, if I worked up the nerve, I would tell them later that I hadn’t been answering the call of Vivian but had been reading a book. But mostly I skulked, shame-faced, about the house, feeling like what I supposed I was half the time, a kind of lust-driven robot programmed to jerk off in “secret.”

  “What if he tells someone at school that his own mother is supplying him with pornographic pictures?” Pops said.

  “He won’t. And no one would believe him anyway. They’d think that it was just another one of his stories.”

  “I think they would believe him. They think you’re capable of anything. Now he’ll be no better than all the other rabble on the Mount. A teacher, I call myself. For the past twenty years all I’ve done is oversee a non-stop pecker convention. The lives of these boys outside of school is one long, continuous cunt hunt. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—that word.”

  My mother reminded him that a pecker that fell into the wrong hands could do a lot of damage. Better I be so drained by the time I left the house that I wouldn’t notice if the girls stampeded topless down the hill.

  “He doesn’t work on batteries,” Pops said. He said I was plugged into a grid like the one that lit Manhattan. “He’ll never run down,” Pops said. “Mark my words. He’ll just improve with practice.”

  We shopped for boots and shoes in the men’s department of a store called Parker and Monroe where the clerks pretended not to notice that my feet were as purple as my face and larger than those of many of their grown-up customers. They—all men—blushed at the sight of me as we came into the store, blushed deeper still at the sight of my mother, their eyes darting back and forth between the two of us as they tried to shoehorn my feet into a pair of shoes that I would soon outgrow.

  Once, when we left the store, my mother said, “Maybe you only think your face bothers other people. Maybe they see that it bothers you and that’s why it bothers them.”

  “Everyone cares what everyone looks like,” I said. “I care what you look like. I’m glad you’re pretty. But don’t tell me you’re glad my feet are so big. Some people say I’m nice, like being nice makes up for all that. They pretend. But who are they pretending for? Not me. I bug people. They’d fix me if they could because I bug them, not because I bug me.”

  “Do you think that’s entirely true?”

  “You would if you were in my shoes.”

  “Boo hoo. Poor Percy.”

  “Nice try, Aphrodite.”

  I admit that it might be that my inner self has been altered by my outer one. It might be, as my mother suggested, that a life of looking as I did made me think and act the way I did. But there’s no way of knowing if that’s true.

  Would I have fallen in love with my mother if I was normal-looking? Here’s a better question: Would I have fallen in love with my mother if she was normal-looking? Maybe she was as much a product of her looks as I was of mine. We were both exceptional.

  This might be just the kind of thinking that led to me looking as I do. It might be that the generations of people who regarded incest as I do are the reason that I regard incest as I do. It might be nothing more than too small a gene pool that—who knows how long ago—led to my inner/outer aberrations.

  You may know by now that there’s nowhere else for this to go but to the question of free will. Is there, was there, in the sum of me, even the smallest
of undetermined fractions? I think … that it’s too soon to say.

  The seasons went round and returned as predictably as Halley’s comet. Summer. Tick. Fall. Tock. Winter. Tick. Spring. Tock. But for me, they didn’t seem to change. It was as if my mood altered so instantly with the weather that every season seemed to be the norm, the persisting, year-round season, the others lost to memory. It seemed, on hot days, that there was no season but summer, on cold and snowy ones that there was none but winter. It seemed the drowsy, dozing days of fall would never end and that spring was a herald of nothing but more damp days of spring. Time, which had previously seemed to race, now stood still, leaving me hopelessly at odds with everything.

  THE PERCY JOYCE COMPLEX

  ON a Friday night in late May, a month before I turned thirteen, my mother said she was going to rent a car and take us up Signal Hill for a picnic the next day.

  “I assume I’m not invited?” Pops said.

  “It’s a family occasion,” my mother replied.

  She mixed bottles of orange Freshie, made bologna and butter and mustard sandwiches, wrapped some brownies and other cookies in waxed paper, and put it all in a cardboard box.

  “You’ll freeze to death up on that hill,” Pops said. “They’ve made a National Park out of a place where criminals were hanged and there was a smallpox epidemic. I bet you’ll have to eat inside the car. A typical Newfoundland indoor picnic.”

  “If we have to, we will,” my mother said.

  “Maybe you can build a fire. I can build a safe one for you. They may even have firepits—”

  “No thanks, Pops.”

  She walked to the rental outlet the next day and came back in a car called a Rambler Ambassador that Pops said was the size and shape of a hearse. The car was light pastel blue with brown panelling on the sides, a roof rack, and large fin-shaped fenders on the back. She parked the car on the Brother Rice side of the road, directly across from the Block. Pops went out in his lab coat and walked around the car like an expert.

  “Never mind a hearse, it’s the size of a boat,” he announced. “It should be christened with a bottle of champagne.”

  “I packed a bottle of red wine,” my mother told Medina when she arrived.

  “The problem with cars is the upkeep,” Pops continued. “Repairs, gas, tires, insurance. On and on. It’s not worth the bother. Better to leave the upkeep to someone else and take a bus.”

  “Buses don’t go up Signal Hill.”

  “An excellent reason to go somewhere else for a picnic,” Pops said. “Or you could take a taxi.”

  “Have you ever taken a taxi, Pops?” my mother asked.

  “No,” Pops said, “but if I ever have to, I will.”

  “And what phone would you use from Signal Hill to call a cab to take you home?”

  “Just a suggestion. I thought the three of you might be able to walk downhill. I assume Medina’s been invited.”

  “Yes, she has. She’s family, remember? You can sulk till we get back.”

  “It was the only car they had left,” my mother said to me, as we sat, uncertain, in the car a few moments later. “It’s a goddamn stick shift.”

  I was in the front with her. I had only been in a car a few times in my life. Medina had never been in one and had told my mother she’d rather walk, even up Signal Hill, so she was going to meet us there. My mother said it was years since she’d driven a car. The Rambler roared but didn’t move, then seemed to go dead but did move, lurched a few feet, stopped, lurched again, slowly jumping up Bonaventure.

  “The hills are the hardest part,” my mother said, looking at the dashboard as if at the console of an airplane. “As soon as I remember how to use the clutch, I’ll be okay. I learned on Jim Joyce’s bread van, but I don’t think it’s the same.”

  She seemed to get the knack of it on the hill between Brother Rice and Holy Heart. I had to grab on to the ashtray to keep from tipping over each time we turned.

  I waved at pedestrians, who waved back when they were close enough to see who I was.

  “You shouldn’t wave at strangers,” my mother said.

  “Why?” I waved again, happily. Someone shouted my name. “Everyone knows me.

  “Everyone thinks they do,” my mother said. “And don’t roll down the window—May 25 and it’s still too cold.”

  My mother looked tiny, almost childlike, making the wheel seem comically oversized. I wasn’t sure if she could see over it or was looking through it at the windshield.

  “Cars behind us are blowing their horns.”

  “Too bad. The goddamned clutch is supposed to make some kind of shape, the shape of a letter of the alphabet I think, but I can’t remember which one.”

  We drove haltingly up Bonaventure, past St. Bon’s and St. Pat’s, the two schools opposing each other in a kind of eternal standoff that made me fancy one of them was Protestant. We went past the Basilica on our left, its vast parking lot empty but for a looming statue of the Blessed Virgin. My mother said she thought the steep slope of Garrison Hill was best avoided, so I didn’t get to see if Sister Mary Aggie was back in her room, the luridly flashing Sacred Heart once again hanging in the window. Instead, we went left onto Military Road, followed it past what my mother said was the Colonial Building—it was fronted by a colonnade of concrete pillars—to Cavendish Square, where I got my first look at the Newfoundland Hotel, an old but elegant-looking brown brick structure in which, my mother said, some of the guests were permanent. We turned left onto the east end of Duckworth Street and, leaving the city proper, started up Signal Hill, where my mother once again had problems with the clutch, jerking it from side to side, forward and back, as if she were trying to wrench it free of the car altogether. The rear of the car bounced and there was a gunshot-like blast of exhaust, after which the car at last began to climb until it reached the edge of a billowing wall of fog that instantly blocked out the sun.

  “Perse, I’m afraid this picnic won’t be any picnic,” my mother said.

  Medina was standing against a rock by the side of the road, bundled up in winter clothes though my mother and I were dressed for the fall-like spring in heavy sweaters. It was especially windy on top of Signal Hill where the cliff overlooked the open sea on less foggy days—but even halfway up I felt the wind gust against the car. Medina was smoking a cigarette, puffing on it without removing it from her mouth, both hands in the pockets of her parka, the hood of which was partway down, as was the zipper. My mother waved to her and Medina smiled briefly, waved back, then looked away from us, away from the road. She looked as if she was trying to make it seem perfectly normal for a woman to be alone, with no car in sight, smoking a cigarette while leaning against a rock in thick fog halfway up Signal Hill, as if it was well-known as a place where people went on foot to reflect. One of her feet was raised, the sole of her boot against the rock, as if she were posing for a photograph.

  My mother parked the car on the edge of the road and told me to roll down my window. “Get in,” she shouted, but Medina shook her head.

  “There’s some shelter from the wind over there.” Medina pointed back to a rise of rock.

  “Wait,” my mother called, but Medina was already walking away from us.

  We spread a blanket on the ground and had to weigh it down with rocks at the corners to keep it from blowing away. The three of us knelt on the blanket because the ground was cold and damp. We sat back on our heels. Medina looked around.

  “Nice place for a murder,” she said.

  We couldn’t see the road, presumably couldn’t be seen from the road. The fog was so thick it felt more like mist. Dew gathered in our hair and trickled down our faces like beads of sweat. I smelled the ocean and heard it rumble in and out through the caves of shale that I knew lay beneath us, channels that went deep inside the hill, which sounded hollow. We were able to see only about fifteen feet in any direction. It felt as though we were three actors on a stage, hemmed in by fake fog, about to speak our lines, unab
le to make out anything but each other, the set and the few props we’d been provided with.

  We ate in silence and then my mother said, “We brought you here to tell you something, Percy.”

  “Something bad?”

  “No. Something important, though.”

  Medina stood and, lighting a cigarette, resumed her one-legged pose against the lichen-covered wall of rock.

  My mother took my hand in hers.

  “I love Medina,” she said.

  “So do I,” I said.

  “I mean I’m in love with her,” my mother said. I looked at Medina, who wiped a tear from one eye with the back of her hand. Her face was red, but not just from the cold. She looked away from us at the same spot as before.

  “I know, I saw you in your bed,” I said.

  My mother dropped my hand. “What?”

  “The night I found the Vat Rat stuck in the sump pump hole.”

  “Merciful God,” Medina said. She turned sideways to face the road.

  “What did you see?” my mother said, her face and neck now as red as Medina’s.

  “You and Medina in your bed. You were both on top of the blankets and making funny noises, especially Medina. The door was open a bit. I didn’t push it open. I didn’t even touch it.” My eyes filled with tears that didn’t quite spill out. “I never told anyone,” I said, “I promise.” My mother took me in her arms and kissed me on the head.

  “Medina’s crying,” I said. I’d noticed her shoulders shaking.

  “I know she’s crying,” my mother said. “And we thought we were the ones with the secret.” She let me go and tried to smile. “We figured you’d guess what was up sooner or later. Or discover us by accident just the way you did. We know when Pops is down for the count—he never gets up again once he goes to bed. But you—no offence, Perse, but you’re kind of unpredictable. So we thought it would be better if we told you and explained to you why you must never say a word to anyone, ever, about us, rather than leave it to chance. No offence again, and no pun intended, but you’ve got very loose lips. And besides, I think it’s right that you should know. I don’t like keeping secrets from you.”