The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  I spat it out. All of it. I broke the promise I’d made to my mother; I spoke of our secret outside the walls of 44. I broke the code of 44. I convinced myself that Sister Mary Aggie, being even more of an outcast than me, didn’t count. I told her about my mother lust and “give me myth or give me death,” and the Apology of Percy Joyce and all three versions of Francine. It must have taken half an hour. I was almost bawling by the end of it. I confessed to Sister Mary Aggie what, on the day of the Big Do at the Big B, I would not confess to Uncle Paddy and had managed to withhold from McHugh. It was a relief to speak of it all to someone not related to me, someone who had no stake in the family conspiracy. I confessed, but not because I felt sorry for any of it or because I wanted her advice. It was a first step toward something, though exactly what I couldn’t say.

  She stared at me. “You’re an odder duck than me, Percy Joyce,” she said. “I never asked my mother for a pity fuck.” She fell silent. Her head drooped as if she were asleep.

  I stood up, intending to leave, but she raised her head and motioned me back down with her hand.

  “I never gave anyone a pity fuck before either,” she said. “No one ever asked for one. The men at the Mental didn’t ask. They took, but they didn’t ask.”

  I nodded.

  “And,” she said, “I’m not giving you one either. I’d be in the Mental or in prison for life if I did and you told on me. You might, too.”

  “I wouldn’t want a pity fuck from you,” I said, but I smiled.

  “Too old for you, am I?” I nodded, still smiling. “Go away and don’t come back,” she said. “You’ve made your confession. For your penance, pretend you don’t know me if you see me on the street. Good luck getting your mother into bed. It might help if you wore a wig.”

  I got up from the bed and moved to the door as she turned off the lamp. It must have gotten dark outside; there wasn’t even that slit of light between the drapes. There was only the sound of Sister Mary Aggie’s voice as she went on talking as if someone had taken my place on the bed.

  I heard the rustle of her dress, the one with the red rosettes, as she crossed to the daybed, the squeaking of the bedsprings as she lay down.

  “Goodbye,” I said, but she didn’t answer.

  I left her there, alone, two unlocked doors away from the world she thought was better than the Mental.

  THE CITY OF PERCY JOYCE

  THAT evening, not long after leaving Sister Mary Aggie’s, I went for my birthday walk. It wasn’t my fifteenth birthday yet, but I doubted that I would have time for walking after the Big Do at the Big B.

  I was starting to think it might just suit me, this city of obscurity and occasional renown. Surely, in this mecca of misfits, there was a place for me.

  The Discovered City. The Adopted City. The city from which no traveller returns. The city of those who roam the earth in search of a place in which to start again.

  The City of Homebodies. Of people who had nothing to compare it to.

  The city whose people sounded like no one else on earth. The parochial, universal city.

  Might not this little city stand as well as any for all the other cities of the world?

  The City of Vivacity. The City of Soul-Reviving Laughter. The City of Knee-Weakening Beauty and Stomach-Turning Ugliness. The City of Saucy Crackies. The City Whose Dead Could Do No Wrong.

  Its people were descended from a priest-ridden race. Its forgotten souls still walked the streets.

  I saw ragged flags, faded flags and flagless flagpoles, all of them the work of the wind.

  I went down to the harbour, which smelled of European cigarettes. Dressed in white undershirts and black pants, foreign fishermen played soccer while puffing on pink cigarettes. “Olá, Percy,” they shouted. Even they knew my name.

  “Olá,” I shouted back.

  I spied out, often hid from, priest-driven, window-tinted Cadillacs that cruised the streets like unmarked cars.

  The Pretty City. The Eyesore City. The City of Cod.

  There were those who thought they owned the place and others who had nothing to their name.

  I passed innumerable bars and wondered if, when I was old enough, I would ever go to one. My mother had once said that St. John’s was full of captivating alcoholics and clean-living windbags.

  The City of Piety and Blasphemy.

  I could work outdoors at night, be a cab driver whose fares could see nothing but the back of my head. I could be a mural-painting vandal or one who drew graffiti on the undersides of overpasses.

  My mother had told me I needed a profession that would engage my mind, but I knew from her example that an avocation of that sort would do.

  I imagined going home to her at night after days of eking out a living as a salesman, mine the front-line face of the latest version of the vacuum cleaner.

  I wondered what Pops would want with me if I were not the son of the woman he adored. Pops would have sung the praises of Vlad the Impaler if he was related to my mother. What about Medina? Illiteracy was the profoundest form of world disdain that she could think of, short of suicide. No point boning up on a world in which a nun who beat her bloody with a stick got off scot-free. But she had never volunteered to help the other “challenged” of St. John’s. And my mother? She, too, was happy to let the other freaks go on fending for themselves; would she have given me the time of day if I were not her son? Bloody-minded but irresistible questions.

  Saint Drogo, I realized, didn’t hide himself away to spare other people; he did it to excuse himself from a life he knew he couldn’t stand to live. He didn’t beatify or canonize himself—the Vatican did that.

  I had to do something. I knew what I wanted. I wanted what everyone wants at the end. I wanted my mother. My mommy, you might be thinking.

  Would I live out my days as a grudge-holding hermit? Would I find a place in this city whose every other soul was an artist for all seasons, poet/painter/singer/sculptor/actor and musician? Would I swell by one the number of failed prodigies, or achieve an unforeseen success? Perhaps I would become a creepy frequenter of tree-shrouded cemeteries, narrow, pee-reeking alleyways, empty, summer, twilit playgrounds.

  No. Heading back on the bus to 44, I felt the distant stir and surge of something great in what I could find no name for but my soul. Percy Joyce. Something was soon to be let loose that nets and flags and prison walls could not hold back from flight.

  THE LAST SUITOR OF PENELOPE

  THE night before the Big Do at the Big B, I felt that I had been deep in sleep for hours and that it must therefore be very late or even on the verge of morning. There was a thin slant of light across the bottom right-hand corner of my bunk. I thought my door, which never shut firmly, might have slipped open by itself or have come open in the faint breeze that was always created when someone entered or left the house by the back door. But then the slant of light was interrupted by a shadow. Someone was standing in the doorway, peering in at me through the slight opening. I hadn’t moved and it was too dark for the person in the doorway to have seen my face, so I partly closed my eyes and watched.

  Because of the height of my bunk, I saw only the upper part of the doorway, but I thought I could make out my mother’s silhouette, her hair backlit by the wall lamp in the hallway. She stood there a long time as if she was pondering some decision, looking at me as I lay there, seemingly sound asleep. I wondered if an encore of the Great Unveiling might be imminent, or if she might even be considering granting me my ultimate wish, if she had come to beckon me from my bed into hers. And as I was lying on my back atop the blankets, I worried for a moment that she would see the bulge in my pyjamas, but then realized it was so dark in the room that she wasn’t really watching me, only staring toward me, perhaps listening for any sound I might make, my breath perhaps, which I’d been all but holding since I woke up.

  Medina had said, “This can’t go on.” Perhaps she had subsequently made an even bolder declaration, told my mother they were through,
that she was never coming back to 44 except to visit me, or that she was never coming back at all. I wondered suddenly if it might be Medina who was “looking” at me through the inch or so of space between the door frame and the door. Medina come to say a last goodbye to her lover’s son, her brother’s son, wondering if she should wake me to tell me we would never meet again, that she was leaving as Jim Joyce had left to begin a new life somewhere far from where my mother lived. Or might the person in the doorway be Pops, come to make his first-ever visit to my room, to reconsider what to do about Medina and my mother, or to tell me that he had told McHugh what McHugh had long suspected was the truth? My heart pounded and it seemed impossible that the person in the doorway couldn’t hear it.

  The door opened farther, the slant of light a foot wide now, and I could tell for certain that it was my mother. She pushed the door fully open, closed and locked it behind her, and padded quietly into the room, coming round to the open side of the bunk beds. She struck a match, the light from which lit up my pictures of Saint Drogo, the patron saint of self-denial, self-abhorrence, self-disgust, who, I newly fancied, hadn’t spent his life hidden and confined for others’ sake but for his own, hadn’t really believed that his misshapen body would make those who beheld it less able to resist the Evil One but had been unable to endure the eyes in which he saw himself reflected. I wondered if I had long known this, long known that his sainthood was absurd, even if it hadn’t made me love him any less.

  My mother lit a candle that she’d been holding in her hand like a baton. She was fully in the light and I saw that she was not wearing pyjamas but only what looked like a man’s shirt, through the side slits of which I saw the full curves of her hips. I smelled her perfume, but there was no hint of the other smell I had noticed the night she hugged me in the basement not long after I happened on her and Medina. A man’s shirt. One of Pops’ perhaps. She might have gone to “visit” him after Medina left the house. Or it might even be one of Jim Joyce’s shirts, a secret keepsake she had never worn in front of me before. And facing the possibly permanent absence of Medina, and with Pops passed out in his room after his return from the East End Club, had she come to me at last, not only because I needed her, but because she needed me, needed the comfort and reassurance of her ever-ardent, ever-faithful son?

  “What are you doing?” I managed to say as I scrambled to pull up the blankets past my waist.

  She smiled in the light of the candle “I think you want me even more than Medina does,” she said. “You want me even more than the men and boys who hardly know me do. I don’t know why.”

  “You do.”

  “I know what you want. You saw Medina’s face when I was touching her. That’s what you want. But most people never feel like that. I can’t say for certain that I have.”

  “I want to.”

  I felt like telling her that I’d be happy to accept an exhaustive list of stipulations as soon as she had the time to type them up but couldn’t we just get on with it, with the first time right away, now, since she was already in my room, had already locked the door, and I, after five minutes of looking at her in that shirt that slid up and down with every shrug of her shoulders or movement of her arms, was already ready. She kept running her fingers through her wet hair, sending drops of water flying over her shoulder and pattering against the wall behind her as if this was but another way of conferring benediction on the house. Droplets slowly formed on, fell from, her earlobes. She was flushed from the heat of a bath, flushed as only a Black Mick could be, her dark complexion further darkened, deepened almost to the colour of her eyes. How good her wet hair looked in the candlelight, hanging heavy down her back, dampening her shirt, that blackest of black hair that matched the robe which was somewhere else tonight and the V of hair that, on the night of the Great Unveiling, I had tried so hard to see in the shadowed space between her legs. I wished the day was not far removed when she would forbid me none of her, when I could bury my face in that thick, wet moss of hair, hide it there so that we could both pretend I looked like any other boy my age, or that my face would be transformed in that wet nest and would, when I withdrew it, have been healed. I looked at her free hand, her fingers that, without a cigarette to keep them occupied, were fidgeting, playing with each other, the very ones that, on Medina night, worked their magic in Medina as I hoped they would with me, dim though my notion was of what that meant, what special dexterity and slow coaxing my unmarred body might require from them in the dark.

  She said we wouldn’t call it pity fucking. We wouldn’t think of it like that. We might not call it anything, and we wouldn’t think of it as incest. We would never use that word. It wouldn’t be like visiting hours and it wouldn’t be like Medina night. It would never be the subject of a give me myth or give me death instalment. It would have to be our secret, as solemn a secret as the one about her and Medina, but we couldn’t even tell Medina. Maybe. She wasn’t sure about that. She was worried not about Medina disapproving but about Medina being jealous. She wouldn’t want Medina treating me the way she treated Pops, or anything close to it. She didn’t think Medina would turn against me, but you could never tell about some things—you could never tell how Medina might regard me years from now when I was no longer a boy who needed all the help that he could get. Pops, of course, must never know. NEVER. Our house would fall apart at the seams if Pops found out. She didn’t think that even she could cajole him into keeping such a thing to himself or allowing it to continue under what he had some reason to think of as his roof.

  I could barely breathe. “You’re saying yes?” I managed to say. She nodded.

  She had been thinking, a lot. She had been trying to imagine how my life would change as I got older. It might turn out that I was right, that I would never have a girlfriend or get married, or even have a one-night stand. What point were reassurances about those things if they were hollow? She had been reassuring me for her sake, not for mine. She wished that people were better than, in my fifteen years on the Mount, they had shown themselves to be, wished that she could tell me of some place where people didn’t care or even notice how they looked. I was smart, very smart. I would go to college if I wanted to and, if given the chance, accomplish great things after that. I might make true, lifelong friends. Lots of things that the odds were heavily against might happen. It was, sadly, more likely that, whatever my accomplishments, I would spend my life, if not exactly alone, then without someone who wanted me in the way she knew she would always want Medina.

  I told her that I had found someone, that it was just my luck that that someone was my mother. I told her I would want her no matter what I looked like, no matter if I was normal and it was Penny Joyce who looked the way I did. Though I shouldn’t have told her I would want her no matter what she looked like, because I didn’t know if it was true.

  She was barely listening, though. She kept talking. She couldn’t stand the thought of me having to endure a life of that sort of loneliness, or of being barred arbitrarily from beauty. There were details that would have to be worked out. Logistics. Precautions. She hoped she wasn’t giving in to me simply out of guilt for the fact that, however unintentionally and unavoidably, she had made me as I was, issued me from her body with a warrant of scorn plastered like a WANTED poster on my head. She hoped that by giving in to my seduction, she wouldn’t harm me in some way, psychologically damage me or spoil me for any woman who, in the future, might, however big the “might” might be, want me just the way I was, a woman who, to my eye, was as beautiful or more beautiful than her. She couldn’t tell the future. It might turn out that I would be the first man to break things off with her. It might turn out that our affair would go on to the limits of life or the onset of any of an infinite number of circumstances that no one could foresee.

  She said there was a certain symmetry to it. The ménage à quatre at 44 would soon be complete. She knew that my life so far had been nothing to write home about. I hadn’t had much, and not all that I’d
missed was owing to my “unusual” appearance. There were an infinite number of unforeseeable things that could deprive two people of each other. She might be wrong about Jim Joyce. It had only been fifteen years. He might return at any time and demand I go with him. People changed their minds, or had a change of heart, for reasons they could not explain. And lives could randomly diverge. Given what went on at 44, given my circumstances and hers and Medina’s and those of “poor hapless Pops,” we were even more susceptible than most to hazard and happenstance. But if we were somehow parted without her having given me the one thing I had ever asked her for, the one thing no one else could or would give, because she didn’t understand why it meant so much to me, she’d have a lifetime of regrets; if, at the end of her life, she had still withheld from me, out of propriety of the sort she had always flouted, even scorned, she would have regrets that would break her heart. She believed, foolishly, in defiance of the odds, that someday I would join my heart to another’s the way hers was joined to Medina’s. But she knew I didn’t believe it. Most people took it for granted as their birthright that they would find a person who was meant by Fate for them, but most people were wrong about most things.

  She breathed out with a kind of gasp and the candle flame flickered.

  “What we’ve talked about tonight we’ll never need to talk about again, will we?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’m sleeping in the bottom bunk tonight.”

  “Good.”

  She blew out the candle.

  I stayed awake for the balance of the night, but she fell asleep almost instantly. I listened to her breathe and drew in all I could of her perfume. I looked at Saint Drogo in the hope that he would keep at bay my curiosity about what, if anything, my mother was wearing besides that shirt. There might be nothing more between us than a few buttons that I could easily undo without even waking her. Maybe she was waiting for me to simply take what I wanted—climb down the ladder of my bunk bed and get on top of her while she pretended to be so surprised it would be too late by the time she put up a token protest or a struggle. She had shown herself to me. Now she had told me that, soon, she would give herself to me. She was sleeping in the bottom bunk wearing next to nothing. What we’ve talked about tonight we’ll never need to talk about again, will we? Which one of us had she been trying to convince? I turned away from Saint Drogo and peered over the edge of my bunk. In the darkness, I could barely make her out. She had pulled the blankets right up to her chin and was lying on her side, facing away from the wall. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open, if she was looking at me. But she seemed more childlike than otherwise, huddled beneath the blankets as if they were all she had to keep the world at bay.