The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  I looked up at the choir loft and saw a girl dressed in a light blue blouse and a brown tunic. She looked down at me and smiled as no girl had ever done before. I wondered why, wondered what she was thinking. Was I somehow out of bounds, now, rendered harmless by my baptism—or perhaps made more appealing? I smiled back and she looked away. I felt a faint heraldic spasm, followed by enough seepage to turn the fly of my underwear wet and slick. I clenched to pre-empt a further spasm and wondered if, in the confessional, when I had to speak, I’d be able to without spouting over.

  The Archbishop gave me a small lump of what he said was salt, “To signify the wisdom imparted by Faith,” he said, and instructed me to put it in my mouth and let it melt. I did as he said. He gave me a foot-long, lit candle and whispered, “Follow me.”

  Behind His Grace, I proceeded up the middle aisle of the Basilica, throughout the whole of which our footsteps echoed. An entire row of girls from Holy Heart turned all at once to face me as if in response to some command. I remembered lurking outside Mercy, watching the girls come down the steps, their bare legs pink, goose-pimpled from the cold. Look at the Archbishop, I told myself, look at his vestments trailing on the floor behind him, look at his shoulders that, even layered in gold-woven cloth, seem so thin and bony.

  Instead, the memory of how the chrism oil had felt came to mind, the slow, warm crawl of it across my forehead, as did the thought of how it might feel if I applied it elsewhere, or if my mother did, her hand slick with it. I recalled the night of the Great Unveiling, her tits upright and nipple-crowned. I felt another spasm, a near shudder that I fought back with a clench so tight I wondered if, inside, I might be bleeding. I focused again on the Archbishop, who, in this very church, eleven years ago, had preached a Sermon on the Mount for Percy Joyce. On the mount.

  The smoke from the incense-piping thuribles made my eyes water; tears that may have been mistaken for sheer joy ran down my face. I went where I was told to go, did what I was told to do, was steered, guided, pushed every which way by hands that sometimes were McHugh’s and sometimes others. I attended to urgent instructions from a dozen unfamiliar voices. I heard my name spoken next to my ear, over and over, by men I was certain I had never met but who said “Percy” as if they had known me all my life. “Follow me, Percy. Don’t walk too fast, Percy. Be careful, Percy, you’re stepping on His Grace’s vestments.” Blood pounded in my pants as if my dick had traded places with my heart. “Light this candle from this candle. Don’t let the wax drip on the floor. Read these words out loud. Speak louder, Percy, but don’t shout.”

  It occurred to me that my mother and Pops were surely being scrutinized themselves. The unlikely winner of the Penelope Joyce sweepstakes was Pops, never mind how much his ticket cost, the boys of the Mount appraising my mother out of wonder that she let Pops have his way with her, may have let him have it all and then some just last night.

  His Grace and I each opened a door of one of the wall-side confessionals, His Grace handing his ceremonial staff to an assisting priest. I stepped into that little phone booth–like compartment for the first time in my life and, with beads of sweat dripping down my face, knelt and leaned my forehead against the screen and considered letting go, letting it happen in here where no one would notice the changes in my posture and expression, where no one would hear if I moaned louder than I ever had.

  “Bless me, Your Grace, for I have sinned, this is my first confession.” Someone said it, it must have been me. It was not until I was in the musty darkness of the confessional, no longer conspicuously on display, that I felt truly afraid for my soul, in whose existence I did not believe. Just seconds after a soul-cleansing baptism, I was, in the words of the catechism, about to bring upon myself “the dreadful torments of body and mind” that, as a punishment for mortal sin, would eternally endure. “The body will be tortured in all its members and senses.” I was about to make a confession that was not humble, not entire, not sincere just after I had received the first and greatest of all the sacraments while in a state of faithlessness and tumescence, which was surely the most mortal of all mortal sins.

  I recited, by way of “confessing,” my apology of months before verbatim to His Grace, who forgave me without hesitation and assigned me a lengthy penance that consisted of many prayers I had learned from the catechism. I rose to leave, but he wasn’t finished with me.

  “You have had a difficult childhood, Percy,” Uncle Paddy said. I saw him in shadow, sitting side on to the screen, to which his ear was almost pressed. “You have already endured more than most will endure in a lifetime. And, being but a child, you have yet to endure the greatest of the sufferings that will come your way. I believe that you have a vocation, Percy. Offer up your suffering to God. Devote your life to Him and become a priest of God. I say this as much for the sake of others as for you. You can do great good, Percy. You were made as you are for a purpose. Do you believe me?”

  I quelled the strongest shudder yet, grabbed my crotch with both hands and squeezed my dick as if in the hope of wringing from it an answer to Uncle Paddy’s question.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” I gasped.

  “Are you feeling well, Percy?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “Will you reflect on this matter of your vocation? Will you pray to the Holy Ghost for guidance?”

  “Yes, Your Grace, I will.”

  “You are a brilliant young man, Percy. It is often those who, as children, are most troublesome who turn out to have true charisma, the gift of the very breath of the Holy Spirit. The charismatic are born to lead, Percy, born to be followed down the road to heavenly salvation. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “Who knows, Percy, what God may have in mind for you. Who knows to what height, with His guidance, you may rise in the Church. I am as certain, today, that God directed me to watch over you as I was the first day I saw you, when you were but a child, sitting by yourself on the doorstep of your house.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “May God bless you, Percy Joyce.”

  I removed my hands from the surplice, which was crumpled and wrinkled. I left the confessional and walked alone, head bowed, to the altar rail, where I knelt, hands palm to palm, and pretended to recite my penance to myself as occasional coughs rang out in the Basilica like the rebukes of hecklers who knew that I was faking it. When, my penance finished, I blessed myself and stood up, my mother came forward from the front row. I thought she meant to rescue me, but all she did was tug on the sleeves of my blazer. “How are you?” she whispered. Her face had the trace of a smile. Over her shoulder, surrounding my strange little family and filling the first few pews, I saw the clerics, arranged in order of rank, one of the bishops just behind Medina. I smelled my mother’s perfume and turned away from her and the swollen bosom of her dress. She returned to the front row and sat beside Medina, next to whom Pops was sitting as if she and not my mother were his new bride.

  I knelt alone at the altar rail, forced to keep my dick in check with nothing but my sphincter muscle and forced to look serene while doing so. My hard-on pointed, however well-disguised, at Uncle Paddy and the sacred vessels, the tabernacle, the very place of repose of the body of the Son of God.

  At last, His Grace administered First Holy Communion to me. But not even this near sight of old Uncle Paddy could reverse or stall the flood inside me. I looked him in the eye to see the effect on him of my parted swollen lips, my quivering tongue, my oversized clasped hands, but I detected nothing. I knew you were somehow supposed to swallow the wafer without chewing it between your molars like a wad of gum, but I thought of McHugh’s gum and the Host wound up lodged in a cavity on the right side of my mouth, from which I would later have to pry it loose with a toothpick, washing down the drain of our bathroom what many believed was the literal and certain flesh of Christ, transubstantiated by a priest who, before he drank it, turned wine the colour of my face into His blood.

  Then the Arch
bishop went to the centre of the altar and spoke into a microphone. “I wish to tell you that Percy has made it known to me that it is his wish to one day be ordained by me as a priest of God.”

  Applause that did not seem spontaneous burst out among the priests, bishops and monsignors, and spread from them to the lesser clerics and the congregation, all of whom, it sounded like, were soon on their feet in a stamping, clapping, cheering ovation that shook the floor beneath my feet. My mother, Medina and Pops may well have been the only ones in the Basilica who were still sitting. My mother came forward, took my hand and, squeezing it tightly, smiled, leaned toward me and shouted in my ear, “Don’t worry, Perse. Don’t say a word. Don’t look around. Just smile and look at His Grace.” I saw that Pops and Medina had come up behind her. I did as she said. I smiled at His Grace, who smiled at me and extended his hands, palms upward, in my direction. My mother, Medina, Pops and I faced the congregation; I would not have been surprised if, all together, we had bowed in acknowledgement of the applause. We turned and faced His Grace again.

  Making a downward motion with his hands, he instructed everyone to resume their seats. I realized in despair that he had more to say. “I ask you all to pray for Percy and his mother, Penelope. The life of a priest is a glorious but difficult one. Holy orders is the most exacting of all the sacraments. Percy faces many obstacles, more, perhaps, than most of the chosen few who are called to a life in the Church, so please remember him in your thoughts and in your prayers on this, the first day of his life in the One True Holy Apostolic and Universal Church.”

  Uncle Paddy wanted me to believe that, unless I dedicated my life to the Church, I’d forever be an outcast; only in the Church would I fit in. I should offer up my disfigurements to God and live among the only people who would accept me as deserving of their love and fellowship as any child of God. I’d be seen by my congregation as the cleric who had joined just to cut his losses. I would be confirmed by the Archbishop not long from now, and one day, he would ordain me as a priest. He might—who knew what the future would bring?—administer extreme unction to me, an old mentor giving last rites to his protégé, a sacramental grand slam, Percy Joyce blessed by His Grace with all six sacraments a priest could receive. This was the only ending possible to the story of Percy Joyce, the only one, he thought, that people would accept. The boy who, at birth, seemed to have been cursed by God, the boy who had blasphemed and incited to blasphemy the other children of the Mount, the boy who had seemed least likely to be the One, the chosen one, must turn out to be the one, the one in whom all but His Grace had ceased to believe. He would become a priest of God whose outer ugliness was the measure of his inner grace.

  I turned around and surveyed the Basilica, the Big B, the labour of decades, the great dome of the ceiling, the regiments of students. I wondered how long I could exploit the patronage of the Archbishop, and when the day would come to tell him that the plot of his, my, story was about to take a sudden, unexpected twist. On that day, I would make of him as prodigious an enemy as he had been an ally. But so far he had won every battle. I turned back again.

  His Grace left the altar and a pair of hands guided me into step behind him. Now, as we moved away together, I looked up. I had never seen so many girls gathered in one place before, factions of hundreds in like-coloured uniforms spread out like a patchwork quilt of blue and green, assembled in formation for me, gazing at me in wonder that I had come to merit an occasion such as this, that the Archbishop’s patronage of me had not merely been for “show,” not merely meant as an example for the laity to follow, but had been motivated by something he had spied out in me when I was but an infant, something they couldn’t—and never would—see. There were some girls who stood out from the others; they seemed to be members of some upper, super order of girls, the Seraphs of the Mount. I saw Francine, her red hair and freckled face, her eyes the only ones not fixed on me but downcast. Sullen-faced, she looked as if she thought that she alone, of all who were assembled there, knew who and what I really was. I thought of my father, Jim Joyce, and wondered what he’d think of me if he could see me now. Why blame anything on someone I had never even seen? My mother and Medina and Pops might as well have made me, and I realized that was fine with me.

  “This is your day, Perse, not theirs, remember that,” my mother whispered. Yes, I might never have another day like this, one when I and only I was sincerely, unironically celebrated. I tried not to think if the night to come might be my night, my first night with her, the first night she made good on her promise.

  I had never spontaneously come, except in the wet dreams of a boy’s sleep, had never come without the help of my hand, the slick ring I made of my index finger and my thumb and a dab of Vaseline. Now, unable to summon an image of something more repugnant than myself, I called to mind my first memory of looking in the mirror: it had set me off into a bawling fit of fright and taken six months of coaxing by my mother before I looked again. But the memory had no effect in heading off the next subsurface shudder. This was the longest I had ever spent on the verge of coming. I wondered if it would seep straight through the lacy surplice, a glistening spot, a pearl that no one who saw it would be able to explain away unless they construed it as a miracle—the miraculous, literal issuance from me of original sin, induced by baptism, the physical purgation of that ancient guilt, a shining symbol of the long-delayed banishment from Percy Joyce of the first rough beast that had slithered into Eden out of Hell.

  Lines, phrases from one of my mother’s favourite poems filled my mind: “A shudder in the loins engenders there.…” And the title of another, “The Second Coming.” The Second Coming of Christ preempted by that of the “rough beast” that would take His place. What rougher beast could there be than Percy Joyce in full arousal? What “rougher,” cruder thing would they ever see than the going off of Percy Joyce in the most inappropriate of places, an involuntary blasphemy that would be taken as a sign of the base corruption of my soul?

  “Fuck you, old man,” I thought, unable to credit the words that were running through my mind as I looked at Uncle Paddy. “I’ll still be getting off when you croak out the last breath of your unlived life.”

  “Fuck you,” I thought at almost every face. “I turned fifteen today. I’ll bluster past anyone who can’t bear the sight of me.” I said it to the primping chorus line of bishops, to the lively ranks of misbehaving altar boys, to the rows and rows of skylarking girls, to the choir with their roundly open mouths, their heaving chests beneath the colourful androgyny of robes, the nuns who long ago were lusted-after girls, the Brothers and the priests who long ago were lusty boys and some of whom even now were lusting after just such boys as they had one time been.

  A silent swell of exiting students moved me toward the doors. Hands beneath my arms lifted me clear of the floor, but I still stood upright, a head above the other boys. I felt as though I were levitating, gliding in mid-air.

  I thought of my young mother, my Maker, languorous, eyes closed, lips parted as she lay stretched out in a steaming tub of water. I thought of my mother, my mother, her long dark wet hair fanned out across my belly, warm water dripping from it onto my skin as her head moved slowly up and down.

  I could hold out no longer. Still inside the church, going past the baptistery, I came as I never had before, flooding my underwear, my slacks, the river running warm down my belly onto my inner thighs. I let loose a groan that was drowned out by the roaring of the celebrants and the Basilica’s great bell that bonged as if in tribute.

  Still stained, twice stained, thrice stained, by my face, by chrism and by come, I was hoisted onto many shoulders. Facing skyward, I lay flat on my back, made an X of my arms across my chest and closed my eyes as if I had been borne outside minus the casket I would soon be buried in.

  I was swarmed by throngs of screaming students, many of them girls who had had to wait outside for my emergence as they might have waited for a sight of the newly chosen Pope. McHugh stood just insi
de the doorway, applauding with the others, not smiling or chewing gum, wearing an expression that clearly conveyed he had always known. There were so many people crowding the doorway and so many standing on chairs on either side of it to get a glimpse of me that we barely squeezed through, barely made it out into the open air. I saw my mother and Medina and Pops, already outside, descending the steps, my mother and Medina with arms linked in the innocent manner of best friends. My mother and Medina and Pops might as well have made me. I might live with them all their days. I might live with them all my days. That was fine with me and I knew they wouldn’t mind.

  “Here he comes,” a girl shouted, her voice as sweetly pitched as any I had ever heard.

  “Here he comes.”

  Yes, I thought, my heart going like mad. Yes, I will. I will, again.

  Yes. Yes.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to: my editors at Random House Canada/Knopf Canada: the indefatigable Louise Dennys, and Amanda Lewis, both “brilliant” as Kevin’s niece, Kate O’Dwyer, would say; to Sharon Klein, my publicist; to the wrangler, Deirdre Molina; to Marion Garner of Vintage Canada; to Terri Nimmo, for remembering that the book is a thing in itself; to John Sweet and Sarah Moscovitch, copyeditor and proofreader; to my agent at Rogers, Coleridge and White, Peter Straus; to the Kitchen Islanders, some of whom are: Lynda Lou Anderson, Heather Hase, Anna Mantua, Cathy Moorehead, Kathie Howes, John Lennox, Caitie Hase, Amy Hase, Todd Lefever, Paul Burrows, Robin Hunter, Sonya Skinner and Gabrielle Genovese, Pat Thome, Peter Ciglenec, Brantz Myers, Jim Perretta, Trish Crema, Roseanne Luckevich, Ann Hoy, Nate Simpson and Tara Postnikoff, Alexandra (Ali) Marin, Diane Timperley, Chris Hartmann, Indira Dass, Chris Marshall and Janice Okada, Rita Botelho, Simonida Simonovic, and any I might be forgetting who know who they are and will be glad to provide me with their names; to Rose who said “Yes.”