The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “That’s Mom,” I said, pointing. She was wearing a pink blouse and her hair was pinned up behind.

  “Yes,” McHugh said. “That is your mother. There she is, beavering away to buy men’s gloves and boots for those paddles you call hands and feet. I sometimes, when I happen to look out, see her at that table, or in the kitchen. The view at night is especially good. I’ve seen Medina Joyce, I’ve seen our Vice-Principal MacDougal in his chair, with his back to all of you as if he’s been punished and put in the corner. And, of course, I’ve seen you.”

  “I didn’t know where you lived,” I said. “I mean, which floor you lived on or which side of the Quarters.”

  “I’ve lived here since before you were born. Then I used to watch the deacons come and go with their duffle bags. Your mother wore a bathrobe, a black bathrobe, when she worked back then, and when she met those young men at the door. But now she dresses like someone who deals with the public even though it’s always the same old man who comes by to fetch things from her. Why is that? It seems like it should have been the other way around, don’t you think? Proper businesswear for those poor young deacons and a bathrobe for a man too old to give a damn about a woman like your mother.”

  I said nothing for fear of setting him off.

  “Whenever you look out your kitchen window at night and you look up and see that the lights on the top floor are on, you’ll know I’m home, still up, still wide awake. I stay up late. I don’t sleep very well, sometimes. My job is always foremost in my mind. It’s possible that, some night when you look up here, you’ll see me standing at the window. If you do, wave to me. I’ll wave back. Just like two close friends.”

  “Why did you make all the boys think you were going to strap me?”

  “The boys jumped to their own conclusions. I never said a word about strapping you, did I?”

  “No, but—”

  “Not even in the tunnel, when there was just the two of us, did I say I would strap you, let alone do it, did I?”

  “No, but you snapped me.”

  “I have no idea what you mean. I was angry with you. The other boys saw that. His Grace hasn’t forbidden me from getting angry with you. But I didn’t do anything to you. Can you prove that I did? You already look—well—you look like your old self again.”

  “You hurt me.”

  “I had to drag you to get you out of harm’s reach. The things those boys were saying, the way they were ganging up on you—I had to get you out of there as fast as I could. I’m sorry I hurt your arm, but I couldn’t help it. I wouldn’t repeat those lies of yours to your mother if I were you. She’ll lose her temper again. His Grace has only so much patience.”

  I knew he was right. My mother would almost certainly provoke some sort of showdown with McHugh that would imperil Uncle Paddy’s patronage of me.

  “Why did you bring me up here?”

  “I’ve seen where you live. I wanted you to see where I live.”

  “Why?”

  “It makes us even.”

  “But you’ve never been inside our house.”

  “Yes, I have. Once, when you and your mother went out, Vice-Principal MacDougal invited me over and showed me around. It’s a very nice house. More spacious than my suite, but not as well appointed. Tell your mother that.”

  “I will. But she’ll be mad with Pops.”

  “He’ll tell her that I called him and told him I was coming over and asked to be let in.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It might be. I can’t remember. But no harm’s done either way, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You let McHugh in here and didn’t tell me?”

  “He showed up at the door when everyone was out. He knocked. What was I supposed to do? Send him away? He’s my boss.”

  “Jesus,” my mother said over and over as she pulled the curtains on the Bonaventure-facing windows.

  “Pulling the curtains shut in the afternoon will make him think we have something to hide,” Pops said, with a furtive glance at me.

  “It will make him think I have something to hide,” my mother retorted. “Pops, I don’t give a damn about what McHugh thinks. But I can’t believe that he said what he said, that I don’t seem the least bit bothered that Jim Joyce ran off, that I don’t seem the least bit bothered about anything.”

  “Then why close the curtains?”

  “Because I don’t like being spied upon. I don’t like the idea that Big Brother McHugh is always watching. The eye in the sky that sees everything. Did you know his window was so high up and overlooked Bonaventure?”

  “I had no idea. I’ve never been up there. He never mentioned it.”

  “Jesus. Scaring the shit out of Percy. Hurting his arm. I’m sorry I hit that O’Keefe boy. I shouldn’t have. But I was face to face, for the first time, with what Percy has to go through every day. Why did McHugh take Percy up there? What point does he think he’s made?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does he want us all to know he’s got his eye on us? You tell him everything that goes on here anyway.”

  “I never volunteer anything. I just answer his questions.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “You should have let me go to St. Bon’s by myself,” I said. “Boys like O’Keefe never do anything to me. All they ever do is call me names. I’m used to it.”

  “You shouldn’t have had to get used to it. And what was I supposed to do, with you coming home beat up like that?”

  “All you ever do is make things worse because you lose your temper. Like you did with that stupid sermon. Like you did with Francine Dunne’s mother.”

  “That’s because I just don’t know what the fuck it is I’m supposed to do with you.” She began to cry and laid her head on her arms, which were folded on the kitchen table.

  “Paynelope—” Pops said. He moved a step toward her, but I rushed to her, put my arm around her neck and laid my head sideways on hers.

  “I didn’t mean what I said,” I cried, and it was true. But I also noticed how nice it was to bury my face in the soft scent of her hair and to feel her shoulders and her back, as they rose and fell, warm beneath my arm.

  I stayed up after Pops went to bed and sat at the kitchen table while my mother told Medina that McHugh wanted Uncle Paddy to think I was beyond help, that we both were a pair of conniving, unbalanced cranks, nuisances whom he should divest himself of before we started making real trouble for him.

  “Something’s up, Pen. Something more than that. I’m scared to death about what McHugh said to Percy. The part about things not adding up. I can’t imagine McHugh saying that. I can imagine him thinking it but not saying it, especially to Percy. I wonder if he ever saw the two of us.”

  My mother said that all they’d ever done outside her bedroom they had done at night, with the lights down low or even off, and even then they’d only done little more than sit beside each other and almost always remembered to close the drapes and curtains. I wondered how many times McHugh had seen her with no clothes on when she was alone by day in the house, walking from her bedroom to the bathroom or vice versa, her hair up in a towel as she waited for the tub to fill with water. I envied McHugh his peeping perch from which, through even the most basic of telescopes, he could see my mother as close up as if he were watching her through the window from our side of the street.

  Medina rubbed her stomach and winced as if she might be sick. My mother put her hand on her arm. “He was just fishing,” my mother said. “Hoping Percy would let something slip. All the suspicions in the world are useless unless they’re backed up by proof.”

  “That might be true in court, Pen, but it’s not true on the Mount.”

  “He suspects what he wants to be true, which is that I give it away to any man who asks. If I knew when McHugh was watching, I’d let some stranger in and do him on the kitchen floor. That would erase any suspicions good old McHugh might have.”

  “Oh y
es,” Medina said. “You know the old saying: When in doubt, fuck the milkman in the kitchen.”

  THE CHAPEL

  THAT January, after coming back from Mass one Sunday, Pops announced that McHugh had told him that, unless my mother and I started going to Mass, Pops would have to find another place to live. If he refused to do that, he would have to find himself another job. Pops told my mother that McHugh had said he had never liked the fact that his vice-principal boarded in a house whose landlady was a lapsed Catholic who didn’t go to church and who hadn’t had her son baptized in any Christian faith. Now, given all the “trouble and upset” she and I had caused, the Archbishop shared his belief that what he called my mother’s “indifference” to religion might be transformed into true faith by regular attendance at Mass, and ultimately by the resumption of the sacraments.

  “No,” my mother said. “Out of the question. Tell McHugh to tell Uncle Paddy I said no. I said no to his henchmen priests years ago and I’m saying no now.”

  The following Sunday morning, as Pops dressed for Mass, the rest of us sat around the breakfast table. Every so often Pops poked his head out of his room and urged my mother to change her mind.

  “If only for the boy’s sake, Paynelope,” he said.

  “It was because of what McHugh did to the Coffin boy that Percy was beaten senseless. And you want us to go to Mass at his chapel?”

  “What am I supposed to tell McHugh when I show up for Mass alone?”

  “Tell him whatever you want,” my mother said.

  “Why haven’t you told him something? You’ve had all week to speak your mind. He’s just across the road. You can reach him by phone any time you want.”

  “Tell him that Percy and I are sick,” my mother said. “Tell him Medina’s looking after Percy because I’m too sick.”

  “McHugh doesn’t give a damn about Medina.”

  “The feeling is mutual, believe me.” Medina turned her back on him.

  “And what about next week?” Pops asked my mother. “What do I tell him then?”

  “All right, all right, we’ll go to Mass next week,” she said. “But this week I’m making a point.”

  “What point?”

  “I don’t know, Pops. Just go to Mass.”

  We sat at the table, mostly in silence, until Pops came back about an hour later.

  “No harm’s been done,” Pops said. “McHugh told me to tell you and Percy that he hopes you’ll feel better soon and that he’ll see you at Mass next week.”

  “How did he look when you told him we were sick?” my mother asked.

  “Like he always looks, Paynelope. He smiled. He knows you’re just trying to save face.” Pops said the Archbishop merely wanted my mother and me to attend Mass. She didn’t have to take the sacraments yet and I didn’t have to be baptized. The Archbishop said he believed that merely attending Mass would have a salutary effect on me, who he feared might otherwise lose my way for good.

  The next Sunday, all four of us went to Mass.

  Medina had breakfast with us before Mass, telling Pops that since, like her, he was going to Communion “just for show,” he didn’t need to fast, but Pops said that, as always, he would wait until after Mass to eat.

  “He’s probably afraid,” my mother said, “that McHugh will smell bacon on his breath.”

  My mother and Medina wore nylon bandanas, my mother complaining that she hadn’t worn one since she was last in church and wondering why women had to cover their heads. She’d known women who forgot or lost their head coverings to lay napkins or even paper tissues on their heads. If the Church had its way, women would wear their hats to bed even if they wore nothing else.

  “Modesty insists,” Pops said, adding that he didn’t know why men had to go bareheaded in church but he didn’t really care since he never wore a hat even in the coldest months of winter.

  “We look about thirty years older with these things on, Medina,” my mother complained, looking at herself in the hallway mirror. “Heaven forbid that any man should be distracted by an immodest head of hair while he’s trying to concentrate on the death by crucifixion of someone who, two thousand years ago, got Himself into trouble on purpose by telling everyone He met that He was God.” Medina laughed.

  “I’m not even sure I know how or when to genuflect,” my mother mused.

  “You do it when you cross in front of the tabernacle,” Medina said, “and when you first arrive at your pew and when you last leave it. And you’ll remember how, don’t worry, although that skirt might be a bit too tight for genuflecting.”

  My mother smoothed her skirt down the front and on her hips as though trying to stretch it. “I’ll just do a little dip. I think that’s all I ever did.”

  “Should I show Perse how to genuflect?” Medina asked,

  “No. I don’t want him blessing himself and genuflecting just to be polite.”

  Only the Brothers, and the lay teachers of Brother Rice and other Christian Brothers schools on the Mount who wished to, attended Sunday Mass at the chapel. There were not many lay teachers on the Mount and only a small percentage of those went with their spouses and their children to the chapel instead of to the Basilica or one of the lesser churches, so the congregation in the chapel consisted almost exclusively of Brothers clad in black from head to toe but for the white collars at their throats. It was as if they wore not the colour of their religious order but that of their religion itself, the colour of mourning and bereavement, as if they belonged to a local, exclusively male ascetic cult whose leader, ostensibly the presiding priest, was in fact Brother McHugh, who joined them in grieving for the death of Christ and the lives they had renounced.

  My mother said the chapel looked like a coven of warlocks. It was strange-looking, the near-homogeneous blackness of the chapel. It was even true that, as Medina observed, most of the Brothers had dark hair, as well as heavy five o’clock shadow complexions, as if the cult was so ascetic that even razor blades were in short supply, the Brothers taking turns with them until they were too blunt to shave the fuzz from a peach. “A band of hirsute brutes,” my mother called them, noting that even the youngest had hairy wrists and hands. They made for a strange sight from behind, that line of kneeling, black-clad Brothers, in the pews and at the altar rail, the soles of their shoes showing as they otherwise never did, the only part of what they wore that was less than spotlessly clean. “They must have their names sewn into their uniforms,” Medina said. “Do they always wear nothing but black?” My mother said that, among themselves, they dressed more or less normally. “That’s good,” Medina said. “I hate to think of them all wandering about at bedtime in black pyjamas.”

  Instead of the priest, it was Brother McHugh who at the door bade everyone welcome and goodbye, calling them by name: “Brother Riggs, Brother Hogan, Brother Cull, Mr. and Mrs. Macnamara.”

  Pops began to introduce us to “Director McHugh,” but Brother McHugh ignored him. “Miss Joyce,” he said, taking my mother’s hand in both of his, patting the back of hers as he looked her in the eye so intensely that she turned away. I had never known my mother unable to meet someone’s gaze.

  “Nice to meet you, Brother McHugh,” she said.

  “What a momentous occasion,” McHugh said. “Percy a guest in God’s house for the first time in his life, you returning to it after so long an absence. It’s been, what, thirteen years? Something of a sabbatical. Why don’t we call it that?”

  “Sabbaticals are every seventh year,” my mother said. “But call it what you like, this is where my rehabilitation stops. I’m here as a spectator, not a guest. The same is true of Percy. By the way, no confession or Communion for me.”

  “Well. We’ll take things one at a time.” He turned to Medina. “Miss Joyce,” he said, slightly stressing “Miss” as if to differentiate Medina from my mother for memory’s sake, but also, it seemed, to emphasize that her singleness was different from my mother’s, hers being no one’s fault but her own.

&n
bsp; “Percy Joyce,” he said, “the last male of the Joyce clan.” He was so clearly invoking my missing father that my mother couldn’t help herself.

  “The last but for one,” she said, pursing her lips in a half smile. “You’re pretending to forget my prodigal fiancé, a.k.a. Jim Joyce. Call me naive, but I still set a place for him at dinner.”

  Brother McHugh smiled at me in that wise, all-understanding way I had seen other Brothers smile at children, as if to say that he lived already in the Heaven that the rest of us were only hoping for and therefore knew how laughably insignificant our earthly tribulations would seem to us from there. My earthly tribulations. But there was something else about that smile that didn’t so much betray his insincerity as invite you to apprehend it and so also to see that the near perfection of his mask was the measure of what lay behind it, the measure of the power of the man you were dealing with. It was this, I think, this glimpse that one was meant to get of the real “Director,” that made people look away.

  “The Joyce family is welcome in my chapel, witnesses to the sacraments of the Mass. Perhaps someday you will be more than mere witnesses.”

  He squeezed my shoulder, turning upon me an unblinking gaze. He seemed to think he had not impressed himself upon someone sufficiently to address them until they had looked away. “Don’t think you’re fooling me, because you’re not,” those eyes seemed to say at first, but it was more personal than that, something like, “Don’t think you’re forgiven for having betrayed my generosity just because you’ve come to Mass. Don’t think you can’t be snapped again.”

  McHugh’s look made me feel guilty, made me feel not only that I had done something wrong but that I had wronged him, made him lose face in front of others in a way so blatant it must one day be addressed. “The Brothers at St. Bon’s have told me a great deal about you, Percy.” He smiled at me as if we had just met for the first time. “They say you have a gift for learning but have difficulty making friends, blending in.”