The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

“Mom, will you sleep in the bottom bunk tonight?” I asked my mother. She shot me a dubious look as if to say she had guessed my ulterior motive. “You in your bunk, me in mine, that’s all.”

  “I might snore. And I’ll definitely smoke a cigarette whenever I wake up. And I wake up a lot.”

  “So do I.”

  “Okay. But just for tonight. And I’m not staying if you start in about pity fucks again. I’m not going to wake up to find you in bed with me, am I?” I told her no and sighed as if I couldn’t believe she thought I was still obsessed with that. By having her sleep in my room, I could at least make sure that, on certain nights, she didn’t go to bed with Pops or Medina.

  When she came into my room that first night, she was wearing her bathrobe over her pyjamas as she sometimes did on cool nights after she had had a bath. My mother’s wool-woven bathrobe was a modest heirloom of her mother’s. It was jet black, an almost perfect match with her hair, as were her eyes the perfect complement of her dark complexion. If not for the pyjamas, I would have seen the parts of her not hidden when she wore nothing but the robe—her long, thin neck, the first knob of her breastbone, her wrists, her beautiful brown feet which she so rarely displayed around the house. She undid the belt of the robe, shrugged off the robe with a single flex of her shoulders. The pyjamas were light blue and covered every inch of her from the neck down.

  She climbed into the lower bunk, the bedsprings squeaking. “Jesus, Perse, I can’t stretch out full length.”

  “Lie on your side,” I said. My bunk shook every time she moved. Until she lit up for the first time, I could smell her perfume. It mixed with the smoke already in her pyjamas and her hair.

  “Some people were made for sleep,” she murmured. “And some people were made for keeping one eye open all the time.”

  “One eye?”

  “It’s just an expression. It means you’re never less than half awake, never more than half asleep. Just in case.”

  “Of what?”

  “Sabre-tooth tigers. Other night owls who might steal your food. Or worse.”

  “Evolution.”

  “That’s right. The survival of the lightest sleepers.”

  “What kind of fuck is Pops?”

  “Perse.”

  “I just mean what is it called. It’s not a pity fuck.”

  “Desperation.”

  “A desperation fuck?”

  “Remuneration. Maybe. Jesus, I don’t know.”

  “If you did it with me—”

  “My only child, my only son, is trying to seduce me. It would be a felony fuck! I told you, don’t start.”

  “If no one knew, what would it be called?”

  “A deep, dark secret. Very deep and very dark.”

  I leaned out over my bunk to see if I could make her out. She lit up another cigarette. I briefly saw her face flash in the dark. She briefly saw mine.

  “What if you knew my face was your fault?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “You’re on your own.” I heard the bunk loudly squeak again as she climbed out. “Your face is not my fault.” She sounded as if she was crying as she stormed out of the room. She slammed the door behind her.

  For nights on end, I listened at the door of my bedroom, trying to hear other doors opening and closing. Pops’ door, my mother’s door. The back door and then my mother’s. My mother tiptoeing to Pops’ room then back to hers. My mother and Medina tiptoeing from the back porch to my mother’s room. I was certain my mother would have an excuse ready if Pops opened his door and saw them in the hallway. But no excuse would do if he saw them as I had. I told my mother that I could stay up and keep lookout for Pops the nights that Medina came by for a second visit, but she said, “Nice try,” and added that the when-and-what of her and Medina and her and Pops was none of my business. “That’s all I need, knowing that you’re in the living room, one door away, ears open for every sound, waiting for Medina to come out and go home. Can you imagine how embarrassed she’d be if she had to pass by you each time? Or how embarrassed I’d be? You stay put in your room and don’t leave it except to use the bathroom.” Some nights I heard my mother dial what I had no doubt was Medina’s number and later heard the door open for her. But I knew that I wouldn’t have heard it if I hadn’t been trying to, or if I was drunk like Pops. Once or twice, I thought I heard my mother go to Pops’ room, but I wasn’t sure. Always too sleepy to listen for the end of the visits, I’d fall asleep.

  Ours was a strange household, as my mother had said on Signal Hill. My mother spent some nights with her male boarder, wishing she wasn’t in his bed, some nights with her sister-in-law, most nights alone but, I felt certain, wishing that she wasn’t. She knew everything. I knew almost everything. Pops thought I knew nothing. I knew some things Pops didn’t know. Medina may have thought I knew something about Pops’ “turn” with my mother that I didn’t know. Some of the things that went on behind Pops’ door, the things my mother did with Pops, I didn’t want to witness, but I dearly wanted to witness whatever she and Medina did, partly because I was mostly ignorant of what women did and nothing my imagination came up with seemed commensurate with even the little I’d seen and heard, and partly because I wanted to see my mother’s face as contorted with pleasure as Medina’s had been, my mother helpless, abject, all guards down, reliant on someone else’s hand to give her some inscrutable release.

  It seemed that the “I know something you don’t know” games made up the subtext of every evening. And after lights out, it was even stranger. I didn’t know who was in which room, or if Medina was even in the house. The only whereabouts I was certain of were my own, but I knew that, under whatever circumstances they spent the night, my mother and Medina wondered what I was up to.

  From now on, my mother said, there were things we could talk about only in our house and only when Pops was either absent from it or drunk and asleep behind the closed door of his room. In the latter case we spoke in a kind of code, for we were never, could never be, in spite of what my mother said, absolutely certain that Pops wouldn’t rouse himself from his beer-induced sleep to rejoin us in the living room. Even when he wasn’t in the house, we used only a less rigid version of the same code, for a kind of discretion was necessary lest we fall into the habit of speaking openly of anything and thereby be the least bit more inclined to drop our guard when others were around. My mother said we must agree not to exchange knowing looks or to laugh as though at inside jokes or adopt facial expressions that might be the first of a series of steps that led to self-betrayal. Our house was the Trojan Horse, she said. We—except for Pops—were the Greeks, living secretly among the enemy, staying silent until—well, in our case, until the end of never. “Remember, sweetheart,” my mother said, “you can’t even hint to other people. You can’t talk about us out loud to yourself because you might be overheard.”

  “I don’t talk to myself,” I replied defensively.

  “Then you must be the only person in this world that you don’t talk to. Anyway, don’t start. When you and I and Medina go to some place like Marty’s restaurant, act as if everyone you know, Pops included, can hear our every word.”

  So 44, in the rare absences of Pops, was the one place my mother and Medina could speak even close to openly, and now they included me. In the living room, behind the locked door of my mother’s room or mine, we could at least relax the code if Pops had gone to bed. The house at 44 Bonaventure was our sanctuary. It was almost as if we spoke a language there that elsewhere was forbidden, illicit, a language not wholly understood by others but known to be the language of deviance, the keeping of shameful secrets, the breaking of universally accepted codes of conduct, the commission of crimes and sins against all who were not one of us.

  “It’s like being a member of the resistance in an occupied country,” my mother said. “We can’t trust anyone we haven’t always trusted. We never know—and neither do they—who might be one of them.” We were the not-them who “they” feared would
somehow subvert who they were and spread through their ranks the ever-possible contagion of insurrection. They might catch what we had.

  “If I had friends, real friends, would I be allowed to tell them?”

  “No.”

  “If I had a best friend?”

  “No.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “If I got engaged—”

  “You wouldn’t be engaged very long if you told your fiancée about your mother and your aunt. The way things stand now, or are ever likely to stand, you have to keep this secret from everyone.”

  “If I was married—”

  “You couldn’t tell your wife and children. Listen, Perse, the problem is that you can’t know how a person will react to the truth until you tell them the truth.”

  “Then it’s just as well I’m so ugly no one will ever marry me.”

  “It’s not just as well because you’re not ugly.”

  “Don’t talk about my ‘specialness’ like that guidance counsellor did.”

  Medina, walking in at that moment, laughed.

  “You’re different,” she said.

  “From everyone!”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want to be the same as everyone else, would you?”

  “All people are different.” My mother pulled me to her, hugging me. “But some are more different than others, that’s all. Medina and I are different from most other people.”

  “Would you trade places with me if you could?”

  “You have no reason to want to change places with anyone.”

  I felt like saying, but didn’t, that I wished I could trade places with Medina so it could be me who was in bed with Penny Joyce, and Medina who had to make do with nothing but the picture of a woman on the wall and two pictures of the voyeuristic Patron Saint of Unattractive People flanking a pointless prayer for my salvation.

  ST. JOHN’S DAY, JUNE 24

  IF I come across, sometimes or always, as a one-trick pony—lust, lust and again lust—if I seem insensitive to the needs and feelings of others, I can only say that it’s not as if I thought everyone’s lot in life was better than mine and that therefore other people needed no support or sympathy from me. But I didn’t think that “we” were all in the same boat, either, just because “we” had mortality and other awful inevitabilities in common. I was my boat’s sole occupant most of the time, surrounded by heavily manned ships whose guns were ever aimed at the SS Percy. That kind of attention keeps you busy and vigilant.

  I saw such things as disappointment, heartache and loneliness all around me. I also saw that no one wanted to seem so desperate as to need consolation from Percy Joyce, as to have no one but Percy Joyce to lend them a sympathetic ear. You may be thinking: “I bet there were some people, special, strong-minded, self-possessed, who would have liked to be his friend, who admired his intelligence, his sense of humour, his perseverance, his imagination, his courage; boys and girls, perhaps, who made overtures of friendship, who openly approached him, only to be rebuffed by a boy too full of self-pity, too self-absorbed, too lust-preoccupied to accept an outheld hand.” Well, I believe such people exist in great numbers in books and movies for the simple reason that they don’t exist anywhere else.

  I encountered no one who looked as though they were trying to put themselves in my freakishly oversized shoes, no one who looked as if they had lain awake grappling with their bedsheets as they tortured over the question of what being me must be like or how best to solve the conundrum of mercy and compassion that was daily posed to them by the sight of me. No, what others felt at the sight of me was relief—and I don’t blame them. Relief that, no matter how bad things got for them, they would never be as bad as they were for me. That, I’ve no doubt they were told by priests and parents, was my purpose in God’s plan, to be a chastening reminder to them that things could have been worse. Of course, not all of them were right—witness the girl who left Holy Heart after a diagnosis of incurable leukemia. I’ve no doubt that, in adulthood, many of them realized they’d been wrong. Car accident injuries, the deaths of children and spouses, alcoholism, debt, mental illness—all these and many more were on offer in the same world as the one lived in by Percy Joyce.

  But what beggar was ever gladdened at being stepped over by a nattily attired millionaire? Has word that the net worth of a billionaire has doubled ever set off a celebration in a flophouse? In this, if in nothing else, I was like you. I didn’t want to be that guy. I hated being that guy for other people who thanked God they hadn’t drawn a straw as short as mine. Would I have thought this way if I was normal-looking? Whom have you ever met who didn’t think they were somehow insufficient?

  For the first time, I went for a birthday walk after dinner by myself. School was newly out, which emboldened children to tease me. “Percy’s mitts match Penny’s tits / His hands are like two frying pans.” I would walk quickly past my tormentors, seeming lost in thought.

  My face, at thirteen, looked as if it had been hacked from the red granite of Signal Hill, like the rust-encrusted hulls of ships moored bows to sterns in the harbour, like the blood sausage in the butcher shop. It looked like the red brick of the Anglican cathedral in the rain. It looked like everyone’s face does when coming in from the bitter cold, like the pyramids of five-point apples in the supermarket, like fillets of salmon laid out for inspection on crushed ice, like the lobsters that clinked their claws against their tanks while curious, pitiless people pressed their faces to the glass.

  Earlier in the year, one of the Brothers had brought to my attention a quotation from Samuel Johnson, no doubt thinking I should have been finding solace in books, poetry, novels: “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” I had no doubt which camp he thought I belonged to, but I didn’t think my life was such that I had to settle for enduring it. I liked books, but didn’t see them as alternatives to life or as remedies for the terms of my existence. I didn’t believe the inspiring stories my mother had read to me when I was younger. I doubted that even Mary Shelley would have given me the time of day any more than she would have given it to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation had she encountered him for real while palling around with my namesake. Or that Beauty gave a flying fuck about the Beast. A woman as beautiful as Esmerelda wouldn’t have imperilled her life by publicly giving the hunchbacked Quasimodo a drink of water as he lay chained astride a millstone in the searing sun of Paris. I knew that big-conked Cyrano would not have gotten close enough to Roxanne to make himself heard to her, let alone perish in her arms as she told him she loved him.

  I walked far afield from 44 Bonaventure. Downtown, the row houses reminded me of trains whose every double-decker car was painted differently; the people, arms folded, who gazed out of the open windows might have been the passengers except it was me who moved past them and they who stayed in place. They waved, nodded their heads, winked in acknowledgement not so much of me as of the collegial feeling of evening, the dying down of the wind, the abatement of traffic and skylarking children, the slow-rolling fog that, when the air cooled after sunset, came in through the Narrows from the sea. The evening-out of all things, all people, as time moved once more into night as inexorably for others as for me, a reassuring reminder to me of an ultimate commonality that was otherwise all too easy to ignore. I remembered the winter look of the city, the frozen froth on the rock face of the Brow, green because it was pickled by the sea salt in the air. The torrents of blowing snow in the gaps between the trees on the ridges of the hills before a storm. I watched the dark lop on Quidi Vidi Lake, each wave’s “skin” faintly wrinkled by the wind. Seagulls screeching and diving and gliding on the gale, hovering above the waves, staying in one spot like low-flying, soon-to-crash kites just for the fun of it, just because they knew they were being watched by the landbound likes of me. At such moments I felt I had as much right to be there—and to be as I was—as everything else. The birds took me to be no more or less of
an intrusion than they would any human.

  I encountered the Telegram boys, delivery boys who, late each afternoon, fanned out across the city, referred to as “boys” though every one of them was a grown man and some of them looked as if they were in their sixties. Shabbily dressed at best, they lugged around their beige canvas bags that barely legibly read The Telegram, the straps slung tightly like the sashes of uniforms across their chests, their hands blackened and their faces smudged by the fresh, still-warm newsprint. They earned one cent per delivery; all wore the same fierce-faced, cold-besieged expression of those who, though they worked outdoors, had never grown accustomed to the weather. These boy-men cocked their heads and grinned ironically at me as if our lots in life were much the same, and had been apportioned to us by that same not-to-be-trusted-respected-or-defied “crowd,” the nebulous never-seen few who ran the world. There was something wrong, physically or mentally, with almost all of them—they walked with a limp, were toothless, illiterate, had a speech impediment, were missing a hand, had the IQ of a child half my age, were runty, squat or in some minor way malformed—as if they had been culled from the freaks and misfits of the city. There was an army of them, whose ranks, if not for my family, I might have had no choice but to join. Yet there were times when I wished I could have joined them.

  Once, sitting at a sidewalk picnic table, I was startled by my reflection in a store window. It was not my stain that startled me so much as my slobbering lower lip. I looked as if I had caught myself in the act of nodding off, my head leaned sideways on one large hand like some animal pondering a sight it had never seen before. I quickly removed and hid my hand, straightened up, and looked away so there was nothing in my line of sight but the normal-seeming world.

  Did I have greater and more oddly focused carnal appetites than other boys my age? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I did wonder what holding hands with a girl, what kissing one would be like, how it would be if there were no impediments between us but simple shyness, awkwardness, nervousness born of nothing more than inexperience. I could, I did, imagine not just physical normalcy but normalcy of personality and character, but I could not, by doing so, simply become a normal boy who was incidentally—who just happened by the by—to be misshapen, for I could not be other than what growing up that way had made me. It made no sense to me to wonder how I would have turned out if I had not been so different. I could not will my heart into bleeding like a saint’s for other people. Merely to survive tasked me to the limits of my soul.