The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  She got up from the table, a glass of beer in one hand, went to the sunroom and spun around Pops’ chair. “You knew about it all along, didn’t you? Percy getting baptized. Taking your name. McHugh may as well have announced the day of our wedding.”

  “I’m sorry, Paynelope, but McHugh is a hard man to argue with. No one will think all this has anything to do with us.”

  “For the umpteenth time, there is no us,” she said quietly, then slowly poured her glass of beer over his head. It must have been warm, for he didn’t draw so much as a single extra breath but merely sat there, eyes closed, as the beer ran down all sides of his head, frothing up his face, trickling down beneath the collar of his lab coat and his shirt. He wiped the beer from his eyes and the rest of his face with the sleeves of his lab coat.

  “There,” my mother said. “There you go, Jerome. Properly baptized.” She went back to the table, sat down and lit up a cigarette.

  Medina threw back her head and laughed. “That head has a big beer on it.”

  Pops struggled out of the chair and, removing the lab coat as he walked, slowly zigzagged to his room and closed the door behind him. Medina laughed again. “He’s so drunk he barely noticed.” Pops soon emerged from his room wearing a different shirt and pair of slacks, his hair matted down with beer.

  “No harm done,” he muttered.

  “The harm is being done at this very moment,” my mother said. “The Apology of Percy Joyce. A famous day in the history of the Mount. I don’t suppose you and McHugh have set a date for the baptism yet. Don’t lie to me again, Pops.”

  “I’ve never lied to you, Paynelope. Left out some things, that’s all. Sins of omission, that’s all. No date set yet. But His Grace has agreed to baptize Percy in the Basilica.”

  “I don’t care if the Pope has agreed to baptize him in the Sistine Chapel. Have you and McHugh made any other plans that I should know about?”

  “World domination,” Pops said.

  “You do understand that you and I will never get married, don’t you?”

  “Never say never.”

  “You should say it in this case.”

  “Why don’t you want to marry me? No one else is beating down your door. There is a dearth of suitors in your life.”

  “My door gets banged on more often than you think, but I keep it locked.”

  “Sorry. Where do I rank among the many thousands beating down your door?”

  “You’re all deadlocked in a last-place tie.” She looked at me and smiled and faintly shook her head. I wasn’t sure if she meant to tell me that she didn’t see me as being on a par with sub-par Pops or that I must keep quiet about Medina.

  “Do you still carry a torch for Jim Joyce, Paynelope?”

  “I do not carry so much as a single unlit match for Jim Joyce.”

  “He turned you off marriage for life?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Still. You never know. That’s what McHugh says. You never know. He tells me don’t give up, you never know, she might come round.”

  “So there it is. That’s what he wants.”

  “I’ve asked you three times to marry me, Paynelope.”

  “Three times?” I said.

  “Yes,” my mother said as offhandedly as if she had meant to provoke this disclosure from him.

  “McHugh says we’d all be better off with your sort-of sister-in-law out of the picture.”

  My mother and Medina traded looks. “Why did he say that, Pops?” my mother asked gently.

  “I don’t know. I give him such glowing accounts of her.”

  “What do you tell McHugh about Medina?”

  He turned to Medina. “I wouldn’t pick you if you were the last woman left on earth. You are loathsome.”

  “I’m so loathsome I could cry.”

  “Go to bed, Pops,” my mother said. “Go on, now. Unless you’d like another beer, so to speak.”

  “I’ll go to bed,” Pops said. “Why not? Women and children last.” “That’s right. Women and children last.”

  Pops tried to negotiate the floor, taking one step back for every one forward, until he achieved some momentum and all but ran across the room to his bedroom, the door of which was partly open. He banged into it, went inside and closed it behind him.

  “Pops asked you to marry him?” I said to my mother.

  “I was worried you might tell the boys at school. But now that you’re through your phase of far-fetched fabrication, I trust you completely.”

  “Pen,” Medina said, “I think McHugh knows. About us. I’m almost sure he knows. Jesus Christ.”

  My mother, her face turning pale and blank, tried to smile. Medina started to cry. Moving her chair close to my mother, she rested her head on her shoulder.

  “Oh fuck, Pen, I’m so scared. What will we do? I have no one in the world but you and Perse. Maybe we should take off, get out of here.”

  “McHugh may be hoping that we’ll run. He knows we have no money. He knows that we’d be caught.” Medina nodded faintly, then buried her face in the crook of my mother’s neck. I thought my mother might flash me a reassuring look, but all she did was stare as if at the approach of something she couldn’t quite make out.

  PENELOPE’S PROPOSITION

  WORD of my apology and upcoming Baptism, Confession and Communion spread beyond the Mount. Over the next few days, every grown-up I encountered congratulated me. As I walked up Bonaventure to St. Bon’s, some of them opened their doors to shout greetings to me. “Good morning, Percy.” “Well done, Percy.” “We’re so proud of you, Percy.” “We’re so happy for you and your mother.” “God bless you and your mom, Percy. And God bless Mr. MacDougal.” I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Mrs. Madden waving to me from her window, holding no grudge for my having slapped her in the face. Motorists honked their horns and waved in earnest, their faces devoid of the usual ironic expressions. At St. Bon’s, Brothers whom I knew by little more than name tousled my hair, beamed at me, clapped me on the back, winked at me, called me “the man of the hour.” Everyone was as congenial and jocular as if, through the sheer power of prayer, my face had been healed, and everything thought to have proceeded from it and my “non-affiliation” had been undone and would soon be forgotten. Their delusional sincerity made me feel like shouting out the truth. They thought my longed-for day had come at last. I wished beyond expression that it had, hated that my supposed triumph was a sham that I could never reveal with impunity or even with the expectation that a single soul would believe me.

  Most of the students of the Mount were not so forthcoming in their offerings of praise or congratulations; for the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to be envied by others. There was a general muting of even the most covert teasing that I had gone through every day. Moyles, who I felt certain had been put up to it by a teacher, invited me to join the Math Club, handing me a small card on which were written the number of the classroom and the times of the weekly meetings of the club—Moyles, from whom the idea of bargaining with my mother for a pity fuck had come. “Percy, you should join the Math Club,” was all he said, grinning as he hurried off. I received likewise laconic, terse invitations to join the Chess Club and the band.

  We went to chapel that Sunday again and McHugh met us at the door as always.

  “You must be very excited about Percy’s baptism,” he said to my mother. “What?” she said. “Oh, that.” She badly feigned a laugh. McHugh looked about, no doubt wondering if anyone had overheard what provoked her to laugh in the chapel. He could not reply as he would have liked for fear of also being overheard. He could not even alter his smile, though I could see his jaw muscle moving. He went on smiling, able only with his eyes to tell her what he would have said were he free to speak. “The soon-to-be-baptized Percy Joyce,” he said as he turned his gaze on me. “Soon to join the Church after all this time.” I nodded and was about to utter a perfunctory, “Yes, Brother,” when my mother all but pushed me past him.<
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  As I walked down Bonaventure, a man who looked too young to wear a fedora but was wearing one nonetheless, and who was carrying a large flash camera, came toward me. “Can I take a picture of you, Percy?” he said. I nodded. “Stop right there and smile,” he said. “Nice big smile.”

  He snapped several pictures, said, “Thanks, Percy,” and headed past me up the hill. That Sunday, a short article about me that bore no byline appeared in the Monitor, along with a photograph of me smiling down at the camera—if those swollen lips of mine could be said to “smile.” I looked more as if I were sneering at those who would see the picture. There I was in the pages of the Monitor, my disfigurement on full display, my stain clearly outlined though the photograph was black-and-white, my swollen lips making me look as though I had got the worst by far of a fist fight. I suspected that, for many people in St. John’s, though for no one on the Mount, this was the first look they had ever had of Percy Joyce, though they had heard of me for years.

  ST. BON’S BOY TO BE BAPTIZED, the headline read. The story told of my surprise announcement over the PA systems of the schools on the Mount, making it sound as if I had announced my upcoming Baptism, Confession and Communion, and highlighting my former “non-affiliation,” the fact that I was fourteen, describing the encouragement I had received from my mother, Penelope Joyce, my decision to take as my baptismal name the first name of “Brother Rice vice-principal Jerome MacDougal, a long-time resident of the Joyce household and a special family friend.”

  The article made no mention whatsoever of my apology. “Percy is well known throughout the city because of a distinctive congenital condition which has not prevented him from achieving academic excellence or the admiration and friendship of his peers. His Baptism will be performed by His Grace Archbishop P.J. Scanlon at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist on Saturday, June 24th, at two in the afternoon.”

  Three months away. On my fifteenth birthday.

  “And people think of Percy as a liar,” my mother said to Pops. “Is there anything else I should know? Have any other dates been set? You haven’t booked a church for our wedding, have you, Pops?”

  “McHugh thinks that Percy should start preparing for his first confession and Communion right after he’s baptized. He has a lot of catching up to do, starting with the catechism.”

  “Go to the East End Club, Pops,” my mother said. “And don’t come back for a good long while.”

  I listened to Medina from the doorway of my bedroom.

  “McHugh has Pops convinced that you’ll be his someday. I can tell just by looking at Pops. That’s what that Jerome business is all about. What else could it be about? McHugh’s going to insist you marry Pops or else, make an honest man of him and spare Uncle Paddy any more embarrassment and scandal. Uncle Paddy will settle for nothing less, I guarantee you. In which case you should marry him. For Percy’s sake. Poor Perse. He’ll never make it on his own. Never. You know that. So there’ll never come a time when you don’t need Pops. Or let’s say that Perse does want to go out there and go to university someday. Who’s going to pay for that if Pops is gone? You? Me? He hasn’t even started high school. It will be, what, ten years before he finishes university? And then what? Where on earth would he fit in? Maybe nowhere. Probably nowhere. You can’t take that risk. In which case, this can’t go on. You can’t marry Pops and keep him holed up in the sunroom and his bedroom while you and I go on as usual.”

  He’ll never make it on his own. I felt sick with shame. I wondered if I ought to go out to the kitchen and contradict her. But I couldn’t have done it with conviction, for I wasn’t sure that she was wrong.

  I heard my mother cry. “You’re crying because you know I’m right,” Medina said.

  I went out to the kitchen.

  Medina grabbed her jacket from her chair and hurried toward the back door. “Don’t follow me outside, Pen,” she said. “The last thing you need is to be seen chasing me down the street.”

  “I’ll call you tonight,” my mother said, looking worriedly at me as she wiped tears from her eyes. Medina said nothing. She left as quietly, as stealthily as, I imagined, she left the nights she came back for a second visit. She had become an expert with that door.

  My mother told Medina first. She called her on the phone and it took some doing to convince her to come to 44. Medina, still in her hospital greens, arrived with eyes red and swollen, a wad of paper tissue clenched in one hand. When my mother told her she was going to marry Pops, Medina began to cry again and was almost out the door before my mother caught her by the arm and led her back inside. They entered the living room, arms linked, Medina with her head on my mother’s shoulder, looking as inconsolable as someone being led from church behind a casket.

  Jerome. My mother said Medina was right. It was a not very subtle suggestion—more like a command that would soon become an ultimatum—from His Grace, especially with McHugh prodding him about it daily. If she and I, and even Medina, wished to go on being supported by Pops, it had to happen in the one Church-approved way: she and Pops had to be married. His Grace knew that Pops was sleeping with her. It was an open scandal that he could not be seen by his diocese as tacitly tolerating, much less approving of, or as being powerless to end. His Grace had as good as proclaimed their engagement to the people of the Mount by including in the apology that I would take Pops’ name. She said that McHugh might suspend, or at least relax, his “witch hunt” if she and Pops mollified him by marrying. It would make it near certain that McHugh would never tell His Grace about his suspicions regarding her and Medina; McHugh would not want to be the messenger who told His Grace that the perfect parable of the Joyces was a sham. She didn’t talk explicitly about my chances of “making it out there.” But I saw in her eyes when she looked at me that she agreed with Medina that it was at least likely that I would forever need protection and support—and would certainly need it for a long time to come.

  “I’m going to steal their thunder,” she said. “I’m not going to wait for them to tell me what to do.” She would rob them of the “final flourish” of announcing her engagement to Pops without first convening with her. “It won’t be much of a victory for us,” she said, “but it will be something.”

  She told Medina of all the conditions that Pops would have to agree to first, foremost among which was that they would not have, not try to have, children. Second, that Medina would be as welcome and as frequent a visitor as she had been before, would still be my aunt with whom my mother would remain best friends and confer about all things, especially me, whom Medina loved as if I were her child, the two of them raising me as they saw fit, without consulting Pops. She told her about “visiting hours,” about how they would stay the same for her and for Pops. She said she would tell Pops that, having had her own bed to herself for so long, she was not about to share one with him. She would have her room and her bed, and he would have his. Things would be just as they had always been at 44.

  When my mother was finished, Medina said, “You’re going to marry Pops?” as if that was all she had heard, as if she herself had not seen as inevitable that very course of action the day before.

  My mother nodded.

  “He’s going to ask you to marry him and you’re going to say yes?”

  Medina kept shaking her head, eyes fixed on the table as though she were entranced. My mother said no, she was going to ask Pops, who, like Jim Joyce, was going to say yes. Medina slumped back in her chair and sighed.

  “And when Pops tells McHugh about all these conditions you’ve attached, even if one of the conditions is that he not tell McHugh about the conditions?”

  “We’ll be married. Everything will seem, look, legitimate to people who, if truth be told, have even more rigid conditions attached to their own marriages. Besides, I think I can convince Pops to keep even more secrets from McHugh than he kept before.”

  “He won’t settle for that.”

  “I think he will.”

  “You’ll h
ave to take his name,” Medina said.

  “Yes, but Percy won’t. That will also be one of the conditions, that he still be known as Percy Joyce. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ll still be Penny Joyce. You and I will still have the same last name.”

  “Except that everyone will call you Mrs. MacDougal. I can think of myself as Cleopatra, but that won’t make me her.”

  “I don’t know what else to do, Medina. If there comes a point when you can’t stand it, or I can’t, or Pops can’t, we’ll deal with it then.”

  “Well, Pen, I will not be your maid of honour. I won’t go to the wedding. I don’t care how it looks, how strange it might look to McHugh. You can tell him it’s out of loyalty to Jim Joyce, my brother, your first fiancé and the father of my nephew.”

  “I will. Look, it will be a very small, bare-minimum wedding. I still have the dress I chose when I got engaged. I’m sure it still fits. I’ll wear that. There’ll be no reception, no honeymoon. Pops will pay every cent of what little it costs.”

  “I don’t want to see you in that wedding dress.”

  “There won’t even be a wedding night, I promise.”

  “We’ll see,” Medina said. “I bet it won’t go like you think it will.”

  “Pops will be home soon. He might be drunk. If he is, I won’t say a word about getting married.”

  “Then I should go.”

  “Please, Medina, don’t. I’m going to need all the support I can get.”

  “You want me to witness you asking him to marry you?”