The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  THE TEENY-WEENY WEDDING

  THE teeny-weeny wedding at the teeny-weeny church, as Medina called the Brother Rice chapel, went ahead as planned. All things considered, Medina said, it would be just as appropriate if Pops wore white. He could, she said, wear his lab coat, which at least was off-white. Perhaps, she said, he might even wear his safety goggles, for she had never seen him with them on.

  Because it was considered bad luck for the bride and groom to see each other on their wedding day before they were married, Pops got up very early on Saturday morning and went across the street to Brother Rice, where he stayed in McHugh’s office by himself until he was joined there in the afternoon by the best man, Mr. Linnegar, and later by me. I brought him his newly bought suit, black with blue pinstripes, his new white shirt and gleaming black shoes, and his boutonniere. But I spent most of the day at 44 with my mother and Medina. Medina, who had been picking at Pops for days, sat in silence at the kitchen table, morosely nursing a beer and a cigarette. She had teased Pops for not having a bachelor party and lamented that I had lost Vivian, whom I could otherwise have lent him for the night before the wedding. “One last night of freedom, Pops,” she said. “One last night without the old ball and chain. Everything’s about to change—no more notches on your bedpost. No more breaking hearts. The word is out among the single women of St. John’s: Pops is off the market.” Pops said that if Medina ever got engaged, the Vatican would send to St. John’s a team of miracle authenticators.

  Brother McHugh had offered to walk my mother down the aisle, but she had declined, saying that I was quite able to give her away.

  Pops insisted on hiring a limousine to drive my mother from 44 to Brother Rice, a distance of about a hundred feet. He said it would be “unseemly” for her to dash across Bonaventure in her wedding dress. The dress was tight-fitting, showing as much cleavage as the Church would allow when she was engaged to Jim Joyce, not that the rules had since been relaxed. It trailed slightly on the ground behind her, covering her white high heels. It had a veil, which she wore pinned to the back of her hair. Pops’ colour had risen to scarlet every time she mentioned the dress. He imagined her, thus attired, standing on the traffic island, waiting for a break in the cars. “A bride should go to and depart from her wedding in style,” he said. The limousine would wait outside during the wedding and reception to carry all of us back to 44. Pops and I would make only the return journey in the car, as I would have to be at Brother Rice long before my mother.

  When my mother and Medina entered the chapel by the rear doors, I was there to meet them. They were laughing about the absurdly brief journey my mother had just made by limousine from 44, and about Medina, who, refusing to get in the car, had walked across the street and arrived at Brother Rice before my mother did. Although Pops had asked her not to drink any beer before the wedding, my mother smelled of it as much as Medina did. “How else could I get through this?” she whispered, looking guiltily at me.

  My mother and I waited, holding hands beneath the little organ loft at the back of the chapel, until the Wedding March began to play, my mother’s face fully veiled, as I wished mine was. Medina, wearing her best clothes, a green blouse, brown skirt and brown high heels, held a bouquet of flowers in her hands onto which tears pattered like drops of rain.

  “I’m getting married, Perse,” my mother said under her breath. “Can you believe it?”

  “You’re not really getting married,” Medina whispered.

  “I know,” my mother whispered back. “Thirty seconds in a limousine didn’t make me fall in love with Pops.”

  The congregation consisted exclusively of the Mount’s nuns, Brothers, lay faculty and spouses. The only students were the altar boys from Brother Rice. I walked my mother down the aisle as if she really was “mine” to give to Pops, unable to resist getting caught up in the moment, even as I realized that I was as much a part of the farce as anyone from 44. The McHugh-appointed best man did little more than stand beside Pops during the ceremony. Medina had to watch as Pops raised my mother’s veil and kissed her on the lips. My mother said “I do” after she and Medina shed what I think were mistaken by many as tears of joy during the exchange of vows and rings. My mother, in her fourteen-year-old, never-before-worn wedding dress, made sure her bouquet landed nowhere near Medina. No one even bothered to pretend to try to catch it. Then we moved on to the small, alcohol-free reception in the gym, at which tea and biscuits were to be served.

  Pops, my mother, me, Medina and the best man, Mr. Linnegar, formed a receiving line just inside the doors to the gym, barely twenty feet from the chemistry lab where I’d found Pops with what had looked like a glass of milk in front of him. We received perfunctory congratulations from the entire faculty of the Mount, all of whom looked resentful at having to give up their Saturday afternoon.

  To the accompaniment of a record player, my mother danced with Pops as “their” song was played—“I Only Have Eyes for You,” the last of Pops’ surprises—while everyone, Medina included, watched.

  It was an odd sight, my beautiful mother in her bridal gown moving slowly around the floor of the gym at Brother Rice, Pops with one hand on her waist, the other in her hand, the two of them dancing with each other for the first and possibly last time in their lives. I thought of my mother and Medina dancing late at night at 44, asking me to join them, the three of us moving dreamily around the room.

  The reception lasted half an hour, during which the wedding party of five stuck together and were followed about by McHugh, who, solemn-faced, made many introductions in which he referred to Medina as Miss Joyce, my mother as Mrs. MacDougal, Pops as Vice-Principal MacDougal, and me, simply, noncommittally, as Percy.

  Finally, he loudly announced, “The wedding party has to leave, so please join me in a round of applause.” During the muted ovation, Pops walked arm in arm with my mother; Medina and I walked arm in arm behind them. Mr. Linnegar remained standing beside McHugh. We went out through the doors of the gym, down the marble steps and out the school doors, where Pops motioned to the waiting limousine parked by the curb. Attached to the trunk was a display of flowers that spelled “Just Married.” My mother pulled her arm from Pops’, Medina pulled hers from mine, the two of them removed their shoes and they ran down the outer steps and across the street to 44, my mother hiking her gown to her knees, Medina gleefully holding aloft both pairs of shoes as if she had just stolen them from a shop in Brother Rice. Cars stopped in both directions, their occupants looking perplexed as my arrayed-for-the-bridal mother and Medina in a hat that looked like blue meringue staged their token public protest and ran up the driveway while Pops and I watched. Pops angrily motioned for the limousine driver to leave, took my arm and led me across the street.

  “Jesus, I’m glad that’s over,” Medina was saying as we walked in. My mother flashed her a look that Pops pretended not to notice.

  “It wouldn’t have killed you to ride back in the car with me, Paynelope,” Pops said. “I suppose you didn’t want to let this one walk back by herself.”

  “Tell me the truth, Pops,” my mother said. “You were planning to have that driver take us around town honking his horn while you waved to everyone we met, weren’t you?”

  “Nothing wrong with a little victory lap,” Pops said.

  “I knew it!” my mother said. “We foiled your plot, Pops.”

  Medina cackled as he frowned at her.

  “Put her there, Percy,” he said, extending his hand to me and smiling. “The men always have the last laugh, don’t they?” I grinned and we fervently shook hands.

  “Another day, another wedding,” Medina said, feigning a yawn.

  We all changed back into our house clothes. My mother ordered in a large quantity of fish and chips, most of which I ate. The three of them began drinking beer. Pops stayed at the kitchen table even though Medina kept telling him he’d like it more in the sunroom, where he could look at his new haircut in the window. “To the loving couple,” Medi
na said, and clinked glasses with my mother.

  Pops said nothing but, time after time, drank deeply from his bottle of beer. Finally, he stood up, pushing his chair backward unsteadily. “It was not the most conventional of weddings, was it?” he said, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his lab coat. He walked slowly back and forth as if addressing a classroom of students. “The maid of honour is the sister of the bride’s former fiancé who jilted her and ran off when she was pregnant. The bride is given away by her born-out-of-wedlock son who is soon to be thrice anointed by the Archbishop and has all his life gone by his father’s last name even though his parents never married. The bride who long ago changed her last name to that of the man who jilted her attaches to the terms of a Catholic marriage such a mass of stipulations not recognized by the Church that the groom will need catechistic instruction to remember half of them. The groom’s best man didn’t know the groom’s first name until an hour and a half before the wedding. The bride proposed to the groom who, in spite of all the stipulations, in spite of knowing that he is the bride’s mortgage-paying cash cow and puppet, has never been happier in his life to pay for sex and doesn’t give a good goddamn about what the never-to-be-married maid of honour thinks of him or of anyone who ever has been or ever will be born.”

  Medina mock-applauded. “Nothing to say, Perse?” my mother asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Fewer words were never spoken,” she said.

  A few days after the wedding, as I was leaving the grounds of St. Bon’s late one afternoon, I saw a woman wearing a ragged-looking half-length duffle coat, hood up, going past the fire station, headed down Bonaventure toward the crossing just above the steep part of the hill. The imitation-fur fringe of her coat was grey with age, the once-white coat itself almost as grey. Beneath the coat she wore an incongruously pristine-looking pleated black dress with a pattern of rosettes and stitching that glittered even in what little light of day was left. On her feet she wore black, red-toed wellingtons that flopped about as if they were several sizes too big.

  I briefly continued up Bonaventure, then crossed over to the woman’s side of the street. Walking slowly so as not to overtake her, I began to follow her. She crossed Military Road and descended the steps that led to the boardwalk of Garrison Hill, disappearing from my view. I traced her route to the top of the steps, from which she was nowhere to be seen.

  Knowing she could not have made it that quickly to even the first house on the hill, let alone have had time to go inside and close the door behind her, I walked slowly down the steps, scanning the horizontally parked cars on the hill, thinking she might be hiding among them or even inside one. Unable to spot her, I turned to go back up, only to be confronted by her as she came out from beneath the steps, where she must have been hiding.

  Her hands in her duffle coat pockets, she looked down at me. “Why are you following me, Percy Joyce?” she said.

  It was, as I’d suspected, Sister Mary Aggie, my benefactress, the source of my Saint Drogo Mass cards, whose statement to my mother that “it takes one to know two,” made ten years ago, I only now understood. I’d recognized her by her slow, scuffing walk and her round-shouldered posture.

  “I wasn’t following you,” I said. I told her it was easy for people to recognize me but I hadn’t been sure it was her after all these years. I lied that I no longer lived where I used to, my mother having got married and the two of us having moved downtown to a smaller, less expensive house from which my mother was running a candy store that got a lot of business from people going to the Paramount Theatre on Harvey Road.

  “Lies, all lies, boy,” Sister Mary Aggie said, pushing back her hood to get a better look at me. I had never seen her without her nun’s cowl. “Lies that work are plain and simple because the truth is plain and simple,” she said. “No details. The Devil is in the details.” Her mid-length hair was grey but thick and faintly tinted yellow, as if she’d been smoking or living among smokers since I had seen her last. Her face was red from the cold, especially her nose, which was sharper than when I had last met her. But her brown eyes were clear and focused, not darting about as before.

  “I’ve been a long time in the Mental,” she said, “but that face of yours still looks the same.”

  “It is,” I said, “but I might have an operation on it soon that might fix it.”

  “And I might soon be the Queen of Sheba,” she said. “I’ve been out long enough to know what’s up. Percy Joyce’s big day is coming soon. The Big Do at the Big B, that’s what I hear they’re calling it. Sounds very grand. And your mother married Pops MacDougal.” She laughed, then glanced back at the birdlike facade of the Basilica as if to indicate where they’d been married.

  “I still have my Saint Drogo Mass cards,” I said. “They’re taped to the wall above my bunk.”

  “You still owe me fifteen cents. Or was it thirty?”

  I told her I’d come by with thirty cents for her tomorrow.

  “I had an operation of my own, Percy Joyce,” she said, tapping her forehead. “Two actually. One upstairs, one downstairs. Some things I can’t remember. No chance of little Mary Aggies since I was your mother’s age.”

  “How come you’re not dressed up like a nun?” I said.

  “Not allowed to anymore. The Presentation will report me. Then it’s back to the Mental for me. I’m almost sixty. They’ll never let me out if I go back. Don’t say you saw Sister Mary Aggie. They’ll think I’m up to my old tricks.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your mother and that other one never liked me very much. They knew I knew. Nothing’s changed, I’m sure. That never changes. Once a lizzie. I should know. Don’t mention me to them.”

  “Okay.”

  “What did you follow me for?”

  I shrugged.

  “Would you like some tea and some crackers and jam?”

  I nodded.

  “I would too,” she said. “Could you get me some?”

  “I should go home,” I said.

  “Come visit anyway. I live right there. Same as before. The downstairs half of number three.” A row of flat-roofed houses lined the eastern side of Garrison Hill like a steep set of gigantic steps. “You stay here until I close the door, then walk down the hill. It might not look above board, Sister Mary Aggie taking Percy Joyce into her house.” She pulled up her hood and scuffed down the hill to number three, opened the unlocked door and went inside.

  I did as she told me, walked down the hill, eyes straight ahead, hands in my pockets. I had all but passed number three when the door came slightly open and Sister Mary Aggie grabbed me by the collar, dragged me over the single block of concrete that served as her front step and yanked me inside so forcefully I sprawled across the stairs that led up to the second floor. She opened another unlocked door to our right, waved me inside and shut the door behind us. It was so dark I could see nothing but a vertical crease of light between the drapes on what I took to be her front window, a large one that, if not for the drapes, would have allowed passersby to peer into her house with their faces pressed against the glass.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “You might trip over something priceless. I walk around here in the dark all the time. There’s one room and one light bulb in one lamp. I’m on welfare and I don’t sell Mass cards anymore.” I heard what sounded like the pulling of a lamp chain, but no light came on. “It takes a while,” she said. I heard her remove her duffle coat. It sounded as though she threw it on the floor.

  In a few seconds I saw, across the room, a dim red glow, then made out a standing lamp with a dark red shade that had a fringe of long red beads.

  “I like the room red,” said Sister Mary Aggie, sitting on a kitchen chair beneath the lamp. She was the only thing in the room that wasn’t red. “Your face looks the same in this light as it did outdoors,” she said. “It looks like a baboon’s arse. There’s only this one chair, but you can sit on the daybed if you want.” On a countertop behind her was a
small icebox, a two-burner hot plate and a wooden canister without a lid. Along the wall opposite her was a low daybed, no more than a few inches from the floor. The room was otherwise bare. There were no coverings on the wooden floor, which was warped and cracked, no wall hangings, and no other window but the one whose drapes were drawn.

  I sat on the bed, my hands in my pockets. “Prosperity is just around the corner,” she said. In the normal light of the lone bulb, she stood out like a sculpture on display in a museum. She closed her eyes and folded her hands in her lap. I wondered if she was saying a prayer. She opened her eyes and stared at me.

  “What did you do with your nun’s habit?” I asked.

  “They took it away. Got rid of it. Burnt it, something, I don’t know. Don’t care, either.” She told me that, not long after she gave me the Mass cards, she had thrown a rock through one of the windows in the Presentation Convent and the “nutty nun” was back in the Mental. “It got me a place to live for ten years. More food than I have now.”

  “I could bring you some food.”

  “I don’t want food from your mother. What did you follow me for, Percy Joyce?”

  “Are you a whore?” I said.

  “No, I’m not a whore, you carbuncled little bastard. I never was a whore.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Is that supposed to make my day, your high opinion of me?” She squinted at me as if, accustomed to being able to read minds, she could not account for my inscrutability. “You followed me,” she said. “You didn’t come to visit me when I was in the Mental—but why should you? You followed me just now. You’re not the nice little boy you were ten years ago. You look like you’re up to something. Spit it out.”